Frank Tenney Johnson: Painter of the Luminous Night

Frank Tenney Johnson was among the most reflective, introspective artists ever to portray the West.Johnson was an excellent draftsman. He used the best materials available to an artist. As did others, Johnson painted with brush, knife and fingers. Above all, 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, Charles Marion Russell and Frederic Remington. Johnson painted scenes that reflected his preference for nonviolent subjects, scenes that showed the cowboy, the Indian or the Spanish settler in a pastoral context. Among these quiet, philosophical canvases two types stand out: his paintings of horses and his luminous night scenes.Since his death in 1939 his paintings have grown steadily in popularity and have been found to be a primary and constant source of inspiration to succeeding generations of painters.