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| Frank Tenney Johnson |
| 1874-1939 |
| American Artist |
| Johnson was born in the Iowa hamlet of Big Grove. He roamed the countryside along the banks of the Missouri River where Lewis and Clark had traveled in 1804. There, he observed western migration of people on horseback, in stagecoaches, and in covered wagons. Johnson was ever studying the horse and became noted for his ability to portray it accurately. Soon he was making occasional trips to the Indian country of South Dakota to sketch the inhabitants. In 1904, he went to the Rocky Mountains and Southwest for Field and Stream magazine. That trip influenced him so much that he developed his “Johnson moonlight” technique; his paintings showing cowboys under the stars became nationally famous. Johnson painted scenes of the West that were tableau-like; he rendered romantic, poetic Western genre scenes that differed entirely from the stop-action, narrative works of his contemporaries, C.M. Russell and Frederic Remington. |
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