Roger Hayden Johnson (born 1948) American, Long Oil On Canvas. Incredible use of light and shading to depict a manor house with a tree-lined dirt road leading to it in the foreground. Signed bottom right. Signed again on back of frame, along with title: "Morning, French Country Lane." 

Overall Size: 32 3/4 x 68 3/4 in. 

Sight Size: 23 1/2 x 59 3/4 in. 

Frame Thickness: 3 in. 

#6 #4740  

Roger Hayden Johnson was born on a small farm in Iowa in 1948. At the age of ten he begged his parents to buy him a set of oil paints after watching the movie “Lust for Life,” in which Kirk Douglas played Vincent Van Gogh. He taught himself to paint the landscapes near his home, and when he graduated from high school he traveled to Pella, Iowa to study the craft further at Centra College. He went on to earn a Master’s degree in art and art history at the University of Northern Iowa, and met his wife Mary while teaching alongside her at a nearby school. She was French, and the couple spent a year in Paris, where he was heavily influenced by architecture and art history classes at the Louvre. When they returned to the United States he pursued another Master’s, this time an MFA in drawing and painting at Drake University in Des Moines, Iowa. They spent three years in Bavaria where Johnson worked teaching art at the prestigious Munich International School. Their daughter Anna Elise Johnson was born in 1983, and the couple returned to the US, settling in Colorado Springs. They have lived there ever since, where he continues to paint landscapes, ranch houses, and fishing skiffs, the last subject picked up after a visit to the Greek islands in the late 2000s. He instructed his daughter in art, and she is also an accomplished artist as well. His incredibly realistic and luminous pieces are found in private and public collections around the world, and he is represented by the Raitman Art Galleries in Breckenridge and Vail, the Marshall Gallery in Scottsdale, 88 Fine Art in Laguna Beach, Arcature Fine Art in Palm Beach, and Gallery Valentine in East Hampton, New York.