Having begun painting at an early age, young Johnston earned commissions for his work from both the London Zoological Society and the Royal College of Surgeons. By age sixteen he was attending classes in French, Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese at King's College and taking courses in painting at the Royal Academy. He was a precocious child who was dedicated to his academic studies and found various ways to develop his talents and interests. To test his linguistic and artistic studies, he persuaded his father to finance a trip to Spain and the Balearic Islands in the summer of 1876. These travels took him to Paris, Marseilles, Barcelona, Palma, and Sóller. When he returned to London later that year, he renewed his determination to continue painting, and he also promised himself that he would travel again and more ambitiously. Yet the next three years were filled with domestic tragedy and periods of depression.
In November 1877, Johnston later wrote, he became "too stupefied with grief even to go on with his work" when his mother died during childbirth. One year after her death Johnston's stepbrother, George, having contracted typhoid fever, also died. During this period Johnston began to abandon his Christian faith, as he acknowledges in his autobiography, The Story of My Life (1923), when he writes of the despair he felt at these deaths in his family:
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