We met William H. Johnson at station 3, The Breakdown. In 1944 Johnson’s wife, Holcha, died of cancer. He was devastated. He painted Lamentation that year while processing his grief, along with other scenes of the dead Christ, like Mount Calvary, also owned by this museum. Shortly after, Johnson developed a mental illness—diagnosed as paralytic dementia—and he spent the last thirty-three years of his life at a hospital in New York, unable to produce any art.