The Boy Who Sketched Trains

If you go downtown and find the breezeway off West Evans Street, there is a statue of a man in a hat, paintbrush in hand. Plenty of people pass it every day without knowing who he was. His name was William Henry Johnson, and he is, by a wide margin, the most important artist Florence has ever produced. His paintings hang in the Smithsonian. Most folks in his own hometown could not tell you his name. That is the part worth fixing.

A Florence childhood

He was born on Cox Street on March 18, 1901, the oldest of five children. His father worked for the railroad, firing coal for the Atlantic Coast Line, and his mother cooked and cleaned in other people's homes. There was not much money, and young Will worked from an early age to help keep the family going.

He went to the Wilson School on Athens Street, the first public school in Florence, built for Black children in a town where everything was separate and unequal. One of his teachers, Louise Fordham Holmes, worked drawing into her lessons, and something in the boy caught fire. He taught himself by copying the comic strips out of the newspaper, panel by panel, and he sketched the trains as they rolled past the house. For a while he figured he might grow up to be a newspaper cartoonist. He had no way of knowing that small segregated towns did not hand out futures like that to boys like him.

So at seventeen, around 1918, he did the only thing that made sense. He got on a train, the same kind he used to draw, and rode it north to New York.

The long way around the world

In Harlem he took whatever work he could find and saved until he could enroll at the National Academy of Design, where the tuition was free or close to it. He studied under a painter named Charles Hawthorne, who drilled into him the importance of color and saw real talent in him. When Johnson was passed over for a traveling scholarship, Hawthorne quietly raised the money to send him to Europe himself, reasoning that his student would meet less prejudice in France than at home.

He was right. In France, and later across Scandinavia, Johnson found room to breathe and to work. He painted landscapes and city scenes, fell under the spell of the European modernists, and in 1930 married a Danish textile artist named Holcha Krake. The two of them lived and traveled all over, from Denmark to Norway to Tunisia, and his style kept loosening and brightening as he went. Along the way he won a gold medal from the Harmon Foundation back in the States, and on a visit home, Florence welcomed him with an exhibition of his own work.

Painting his own people

By 1938, with war looming in Europe, Johnson and Holcha came back to the United States for good. Something had shifted in him. He wanted, in his own words, to paint his own people, and that is exactly what he did. He took a teaching job at the Harlem Community Art Center and developed the style he is known for now, bold and flat and bright, full of deep blues and reds, simple shapes carrying enormous feeling.

He painted Black Southern life from the inside, church services and front porches and farm work and family. He painted history too, the Underground Railroad, Booker T. Washington, John Brown, a whole series he called Fighters for Freedom. The Museum of Modern Art would later call him one of the great painter-poets of the American experience. He was not imitating anyone. He was inventing a language.

And Florence is woven all through it. When he came back to visit, he painted the people he knew here. Some of those portraits, with plain titles like Jim and Minnie and Girl in a Green Dress, hang today in the Smithsonian and in the museum a few blocks from where he was born.

The part nobody tells you

Then it came apart. Holcha died of cancer in 1944, and Johnson never recovered from it. His mental and physical health slid, and in 1947 he was admitted to a state hospital in New York. He stopped painting. He stayed there, mostly forgotten by the art world that had once applauded him, until he died in 1970. For years afterward his body lay in an unmarked grave.

His life's work nearly went with him. The paintings were warehoused, and at one point were almost thrown out to clear space. They survived only because people who believed in him refused to let them go. When the foundation holding them finally closed, more than a thousand of his works were handed over to the Smithsonian, which is why you can stand in Washington today and see the whole arc of his life on the walls. The largest collection of William H. Johnson in the world exists because a few people would not give up on a man the world had already filed away.

Bringing him home

Slowly, Florence has been claiming him back. The Florence County Museum has built much of its mission around preserving his legacy, partnering with the Smithsonian to bring his paintings home for major exhibitions. In 2020, the city finally raised that statue downtown. There are relatives still in the area who walk through the exhibits and recognize the faces on the walls, because the faces are their own grandparents and great-grandparents, the people Johnson grew up among.

That is the strange and beautiful thing about him. He left Florence as a teenager and saw Paris and Copenhagen and the wide world, and what he carried with him the whole time, what he came back to again and again, was this place. The trains. The porches. The people. He turned the town that had so little to offer a Black boy with a pencil into some of the most enduring American art of the century.

So the next time you are downtown, walk over to the breezeway off West Evans and stand with the man in the hat for a minute. Then go inside the museum and look at what he made. The boy who sketched trains by lamplight made it all the way to the Smithsonian, and then he made it back home. The least we can do is learn his name.