By: Amy Kmiecik

Onekama Middle School

One of the many paintings by William Johnson.

William Henry Johnson

William H. Johnson

William was born in 1901 in Florence, South Carolina. Johnson grew up in poverty and did not have a lot of education like most of the kids in his generation. His father who supposedly was a member of the white community did not help raise William or help pay for food or other things important. Williams’s mom later got married again and had four more kids.

William’s stepfather was a hard worker and had a good job till he got injured in an accident and not able to work.  William Johnson’s mother cooked, washed, and ironed fro white families to get money for food.  William was the oldest so he did fieldwork during the season, helped out at his home, and looked after his younger siblings. William started drawing and copying comic strips at a young age. His teacher saw him drawing pictures in the dirt, so the teacher gave him supplies to draw like paper pencils. By the time he was a teen, he had left school to help his family but after that decided to be and artist and go to New York to study.

William enrolled at the National Academy of Design, that school is known for its high standards and hard training. Johnson did very good at that collage he won many prizes and Charles Hawthorn noticed Johnson helped him financially by providing summer work and arranged for him to get free tuition. Although Johnson won other awards over the next many years he did not received the most over those years, but he did not receive the most highly-prized award to study in Europe for a year.  Hawthorne blamed it on prejudice, so Hawthorne helped to raise enough money for William Johnson to go to Europe.

William Johnson got a mental illness and it got worse and worse. Then he went to Denmark to see his late wife’s family. After that he went back to New York and he did not paint ever again. He was in the hospitalized till he died in 1970.

 

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