Existing comment:
George H. Ben Johnson
Idyll of Virginia Mountains, 1945
Johnson, who earned his living in Richmond, Virginia, as a mail carrier, taught himself to draw and paint. In the 1910s, he penned dozens of editorial cartoons for the city's leading black newspaper, many denouncing the inequities of Jim Crow segregation. As a painter, Johnson focused primarily on biblical and historical subjects, but he also produced still lifes and landscapes -- Idyll of Virginia Mountains being one of the most lyrical. Here he locates the viewer high up on a craggy promontory of the state's famed Blue Ridge range, defined in painterly strokes of turquoise, violet grey, and brown. In places, touches of peach pigment suggest the glancing rays of the setting sun.
During the anxious years of 1944 and 1945, VMFA quietly crossed racial barriers by acquiring its first artworks made by African Americas. Jacob Lawrence's "Subway--Home from Work" and Leslie Bolling's "Cousin-on-Friday" were received as gifts (both are on view nearby), followed by this light-filled canvas, purchased from the museum's annual Virginia artists exhibition. |