David Johnson was an American artist was born in New York City; New York. He was a member of the Hudson River School painters in the second generation. He was studied at the antique school of the National Academy of Design for the two years and also studied for a short time with the Hudson River artist Jasper Francis Cropsey. He was famous for the improvement of Luminism, together with John William Casilear and Frederick Kensett. Johnson was demonstrating at the National Academy of Design in New York regularly in 1850. He exhibited expansively in other most important American art centers, as well as Chicago, Philadelphia and Boston. In 1908 he expired in Walden, New York.