Joshua Johnson

Artist

• Born: c. 1763
• Birthplace: possibly Baltimore, Maryland
• Died: c. 1832
• Place of death: Baltimore, Maryland

Johnson is the earliest known African American artist to operate a portrait painting business. His mastery of composition and color helped him to earn a living at a time when African Americans were ridiculed for their artistic practices.

Early Life

Joshua Johnson (sometimes spelled Johnston) was born around 1763, perhaps into slavery. As a free man or freed slave by the late eighteenth century, he was active in his career in Baltimore for over thirty years. Little is known about his life, and most of the artwork associated with his legacy has been stylistically attributed to him. Because artists of this period rarely signed or dated their work, Johnson’s history has been pieced together from accounts of prominent Baltimore families.

Evidence supporting his African heritage is highly anecdotal. Inconsistency of documentation was common among free African Americans in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. For example, an 1817 city directory listed Johnson as a “free householder of color,” but a Joshua Johnson also was listed in Baltimore’s 1790 and 1800 federal censuses as a white head of household. Scholar J. Hall Pleasants first theorized Johnson’s racial identity in 1939; Pleasants concluded that Johnson was likely a mulatto with an ambiguous appearance. This conclusion is further supported by a 1782 court record regarding the freedom of a then-nineteen-year-old Joshua Johnson, the son of a white man and black slave woman.

Historians speculate that Johnson was apprenticed to a blacksmith at an early age. Upon gaining his freedom, Johnson established himself as a limner, or self-educated artist. He may have once been a house servant to the Peales, a Baltimore family of renowned artists that included Rembrandt, Sarah Miriam, and abolitionist Charles Willson Peale. Johnson most likely learned the basic principles of art from Charles Peale Polk, with whom he shares many stylistic qualities.

Life’s Work

Aspects of Johnson’s technique that are considered amateurish ultimately became associated with his style. Remarkably similar to the work of Polk, Johnson’s figure paintings are stiff and impassive. His rendering of limbs is rigid, and some experts consider his talents primitive when compared with his counterparts. However, Johnson excelled through his skillful use of color and balanced composition. His work is praised for its prudish charm, and his detailed rendering of ornaments garnered him the title “brass tacks artist”—long before such works were credited to him by name. Modern collectors tend to celebrate Johnson’s mature style, which is best exemplified in his portraits of children.

It can be argued that Johnson specialized in child portraiture, with forty-six of his eighty paintings covering young subjects. Pieces such as Charles John Stricker Wilmans (c. 1803-1805) and Emma van Name (c. 1805) epitomize Johnson’s mature style, which includes linear precision, use of props, and a flat finish that complements the delicacy and innocence of childhood. Historians suggest that painting children afforded Johnson greater confidence, given his race and the social nature of portrait painting. Although his craft became repetitive, children were a subject in which he showed great accomplishment.

Johnson was uncommonly successful as an artist. While Rembrandt Peale and Polk were unable to survive as portraitists in Baltimore, Johnson’s portrait business spanned approximately thirty years. His subjects were an assortment of white aristocrats that included slaveholders, sea captains, and shopkeepers. Scholars later identified several of these figures in earlier paintings by Polk. Judging from the advertisements of his competition in the early nineteenth century, it is believed that Johnson received twenty-five dollars per portrait, the rough equivalent of three hundred dollars in the twenty-first century. Evidence suggests that Johnson also was a trained blacksmith. He may have worked as a varnisher and painted signs, carriages, and houses to supplement his income as well.

Throughout his lengthy career, Johnson advertised only twice. His most revealing advertisement was published in The Baltimore Intelligencer in 1798, and refers to Johnson as “a self-taught genius, deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art, and having experienced many insuperable obstacles in pursuit of his studies. . . .” The “obstacles” might allude to his African heritage and childhood in slavery. His heritage also might have inspired two portraits of dignified African American men, dubbed Unknown Gentleman and Daniel Coker (c. 1805-1810). The unidentified man is believed to be Abner Coker. The Cokers were abolitionists and founding members of the African Methodist Episcopal Church. They also were listed in Baltimore’s 1817 city directory as “free householders of color” and lived in the Old Town section of Baltimore like Johnson. Esteemed portraits of African Americans were rare in that time and would likely be the work of an African American artist.

The only work believed to bear Johnson’s signature is Sarah Ogden Gustin (c. 1805), in which the subject holds a book that reads “Joshu Johnson”—notably missing the letter “a.” The work was discovered in 1961, and the inscription verified as part of the original painting. In 1976, Johnson’s name was discovered in the will of Mrs. Thomas Everette, the widow of a wealthy Baltimore businessman. Johnson was referred to as the commissioned artist of Mrs. Thomas Everette and Her Children (1818); based on this evidence, experts were able to identify Johnson’s unsigned work. Johnson is believed to have died in or around 1832 in Baltimore.

Significance

Although mystery surrounds Johnson’s identity, his contributions to the history of African American art are undeniable. By earning a living as a portraitist, he succeeded where many other painters failed. His use of color and composition made his work attractive to clients and, later, collectors.

Bibliography

Beardon, Romare, and Harry Henderson. “The Question of Joshua Johnson.” In A History of African-American Artists: From 1792 to the Present. New York: Pantheon Books, 1993. An objective study of Johnson, providing evidence regarding his identity as an early African American artist.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Six Black Masters of American Art. New York: Doubleday, 1972. Chronicles the accomplishments of Johnson and five other black artists who influenced traditional American art.

Patton, Sharon F. “Colonial America and the Young Republic, 1700-1820.” In African American Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. This account of the lives and times of black artists in early America suggests that Johnson was a member of the elitist, mulatto class who strove for civil rights and the abolition of slavery.