Lunchbreak

John Seward Johnson Jr. was born in 1930 in New York, and is the heir to the famous Johnson & Johnson Pharmaceuticals company. He also owns and operates the Johnson Atelier bronze foundry, where he has fabricated sculpture for other artists since 1979. He is best known for his sculptures of ordinary people in contemporary life situations, celebrating the simplest human acts and attitudes. More than 250 of Johnson’s life-size cast bronze figures have been featured in private collections and museums around the world.

This highly detailed aluminum sculpture portrays a figure with a thermos, a lunch pail and a cigar in his hand. At a glance, he is often mistaken for a real person relaxing on a bench. To create a sculpture with such verisimilitude, the artist made casts of clothed mannequins. Seward’s choice to place the sculpture at eye level marks a shift from the commemorative heroic sculptures popular in Edmonton at the time. He has eliminated the pedestal and made his subject a common working class man, in this case a carpenter on his lunchbreak. The sculpture could be interpreted to promote egalitarianism and show the equality of all people independent of class.