Celebrating 175: Eastman Johnson, Letter to Charlotte [Child], March 25, 1851

About the Project

Join the Archives of American Art and the Smithsonian Transcription Center throughout the next year as we celebrate the Smithsonian's 175th birthday! Explore the lives and worlds of 175 different US art world figures on their birthdays, one for each year since the Smithsonian's founding in 1846. Who was born on this day? In 1824, Eastman Johnson. Note: this project contains typed transcriptions, but they may not match the handwritten material.

Born July 29, 1824 in Lovell, ME, Jonathan Eastman Johnson (1824-1906) was a famous genre and portrait painter. He established himself as a portraitist by drawing members of the Maine state legislature, US senators, and other famous people, including the circle of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Johnson was one of the first American artists to study in Europe, returning to the US in 1855 and achieving success with his genre painting, "Negro Life in the South." He established a studio in Nantucket, MA, and popularized genre scenes of rural life in New England through his paintings, though he began focusing on portraiture again after about 1880. Help us transcribe his correspondence and illuminate his life. You can explore the rest of the fully digitized Eastman Johnson letters on the Archives of American Art website!

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Project Progress (details)

9 pages completed

Difficulty

4 out of 5

(details)

About Project Difficulty

Level 1 - BEGINNER

Content: all typed
Language: English
Format: letters, diaries, flyers, pamphlets, and one-page documents
Subject Area Expertise/Special Skills: none required

Level 2

Content: mostly typed, handwritten in print, or otherwise very clearly written/readable
Language: English
Format: memorabilia, advertisements, image captions, telegrams, diaries, letters, notes
Subject Area Expertise/Special Skills: none required

Level 3 - INTERMEDIATE

Content: typed and handwritten materials in cursive or print
Language: English
Format: newspaper clippings, scrapbooks, letters/diaries/notes that may include annotations or margin notes
Subject Area Expertise/Special Skills: experience reading cursive writing may be useful

Level 4

Content: handwritten materials, primarily in cursive or somewhat difficult to read (predominantly from the 19th and 20th centuries) , audio recordings that are relatively easy to hear/decipher, and scientific materials
Language: English and/or other languages that use Roman script but may require the use of diacritics (French, Spanish, German, Italian, etc.)
Format: audio recordings, letters, diaries, notes and other written materials, projects with templated fields and special instructions
Subject Area Expertise/Special Skills: some knowledge of non-English Roman-character/script languages and diacritics may be useful, as well as experience reading cursive handwriting. A general knowledge or familiarity with scientific terminology.

Level 5 - ADVANCED

Content: handwritten materials in cursive (from the 19th century or earlier) or in a non-Roman script language, audio recordings that are difficult to hear or are not in English, specialty materials/projects such as numismatics projects and the Project Phaedra notebooks
Language: foreign languages that use non-Roman characters (Chinese, Japanese, Arabic, Greek/Cyrillic, Native American and Indigenous languages, etc.) and English
Format: audio recordings, columned data/tables, manuscripts, letters, diaries, notes, currency sheets, coins
Subject Area Expertise/Special Skills: knowledge of a specific language and access to a keyboard with the characters in that language may be required for certain projects. Experience reading cursive handwriting and familiarity with 19th century (or prior) handwriting and conventions/abbreviations may be useful, as well as knowledge of scientific terminology, astrophysics data, or linguistics.

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