Frank Tenney Johnson (1874-1939)
Born in Big Grove, Iowa, Frank Tenney Johnson spent his youth exploring the Missouri River in the Council Bluffs area, witnessing the spectacle of Western migration. Watching pioneers heading west in their covered wagons and stage coaches stirred a keen interest in Western life by Johnson. In this period he was greatly influenced by the artist Richard Lorenz, and became determined at an early age to make art his career.
Johnson apprenticed himself to Frederick Wilhelm Heine (1845 to 1921), a panoramic painter in Milwaukee, in 1888, and in 1895 he moved to New York and studied at the Art Student’s League with such notable artists as Robert Henri, John H. Twachtman and William Merrit Chase. While in New York, Johnson began illustrating Zane Grey novels and various magazines.
In 1904, Johnson moved to a ranch in Hayden, Colorado where he worked as an illustrator for Field and Stream magazine. Later in his career Johnson and his wife settled in Alhambra, California and shared a studio with Clyde Forsyth, painting scenes of Western life and sharing ideas with his contemporaries, Charles Marion Russell, Edward Borein, Frederick Remington, Dean Cromwell and Norman Rockwell. He and Forsyth established the Biltmore Gallery in Los Angeles to sell their work.
Johnson became famous for his “moonlight technique” of painting scenes, frequently depicting solitary figures on horseback at dusk or under the stars. His canvases achieved a luminosity that is in part attributable to his technique of priming each of them with a chalk-white base mixed with a portion of vermilion or Spanish red, and then letting them set for as much as a year before using them. In contrast to the active and often aggressive scenes illustrated by most of his contemporaries in the Western genre, Johnson choose to depict a more poetic and peaceful view of the cowboy and Native American.
Johnson’s art won him numerous awards and world-wide acclaim and was a source of inspiration for many younger artists. At the peak of his career his life came to an unusually unfortunate end. In December, 1938, Johnson attended a Pasadena party, where he gave a social kiss to his hostess. Within two weeks’ time, both were dead of spinal meningitis.