Since 1903, members of Arts and Letters have delivered commemorative tributes to fellow members who have passed away. These remarks celebrate and reflect on the lives and work of the members being honored and acknowledge their contribution to the arts. A selection of tributes is now available in the digital archive below. As we prepared this archive, we were reminded that these tributes reflect their times, and, in some instances, include terminology and social and moral judgments we do not endorse.
For results outside of Tributes please use the general search or click here.
A story is told of John C. Johansen that illustrates and illuminates his virtuosity as a portrait painter. Invited to paint a group portrait of the Franklin D. Roosevelt family at Hyde Park, he set up his canvas in the great drawing room after dinner, arranged his composition, and sketched in one person after another, permitting each member of the family, including the dog, to go to bed as his figure was drawn, then stayed up all night to finish the painting. The speed with which he worked was not slapdash, but reflected his instant grasp of the character of a sitter and complete command of his medium. It was this brilliant technique that won him his most famous commissions, the signing of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I and individual portraits of several of the principal signers. To have caught a group so fluid at a moment so significant demanded more than mere painterly skill; it required the sense of history.
Mr. Johansen was married to Jean MacLane, also a member of this body, and in the touching memoir he wrote after her death, published elsewhere in these Proceedings, one can feel the controlled emotion, the penetration, and the sympathy he brought to his work as well as to his relations with others.
He had an eye for grace and character in objects as well as in people. When his son, now a gifted and successful architect, was a baby, the threat of some infantile epidemic led the parents to leave the city and take refuge at the Shaker colony in New Lebanon, New York. The Shakers made them welcome, and over years of friendly association the Johansens acquired a notable collection of the irreplaceable artifacts of this almost extinct sect, a collection that was later presented to the Shaker Museum in that area.
John Christen Johansen was born in Copenhagen, Denmark, in 1876, and was brought to this country as an infant. He studied at the Art Institute of Chicago, the Julian Academy in Paris, and with Frank Duveneck. In the course of a long and laborious life he was honored by many awards, including the Gold Medal, International Exposition, Buenos Aires, 1910; the Saltus Gold Medal, National Academy of Design, 1911; the Norman Wait Harris Silver Medal, Art Institute of Chicago, 1911; and a Gold Medal, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1928. His painting of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles hangs in the Smithsonian Institution in Washington; his portrait of Herbert Hoover is in the White House. Others are in leading museums, public buildings, and in private collections all over the country.
He was elected a member of the National Institute in 1930.