Eastman Johnson
(1824 - 1906)
 

Jonathan Eastman Johnson was an American painter and co-founder of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City, with his name inscribed at its entrance. He was best known for his genre paintings, paintings of scenes from everyday life, and his portraits both of everyday people and prominent Americans such as Abraham Lincoln, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His later works often show the influence of the 17th-century Dutch masters, whom he studied in The Hague in the 1850s; he was known as The American Rembrandt in his day.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eastman_Johnson

Gathering Lilies
1865
Oil on board
47 x 38,7 cm
National Gallery of Art
https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.140910.html

A solitary woman is shown bending down to pick the flower of a water lily from the surface of a tranquil pond with her right hand while holding other flowers in her left. Johnson perfectly captured the graceful elegance of her motion as she balances on the log and turns to grasp the stem of the flower. By using a close vantage point looking slightly downward and eliminating a view toward a distant horizon, he created an intimate environment of the pond and its banks, establishing the woman as the focus of the image.