Joshua Johnson, Painter

Development and Patronage

As is noted in the survey book African American Art and Artists by Samella Lewis, “because they were generally offspring of aristocratic white men, ‘free persons of color’ in both the North and the South in the early nineteenth century enjoyed a measure of freedom uncommon to most African Americans at the time.”[19] Johnson may have been able to secure patrons through the influence of his father George Johnson. 

At the signing of his manumission John Moale is recorded as being present. One of the first paintings attributed to Johnson was “Mrs. John Moale and her Granddaughter, Ellin North Moale” circa 1794-1803. The oral history about this painting and Johnson that the family could provide was written down by Pleasants and repeated in many publications. The family history indicates that a slave named William Johnson was responsible for the portrait and that he suffered from consumption. Even though this history turns out not to have been completely accurate we do find important links to the upper classes of Baltimore where Johnson would have found work.

A “self-taught genius”

In his advertisements “he refers to himself as a ‘self-taught genius’ and describes his talents as such that he could ‘insure the most precise and natural likenesses’ of his sitters. His works reportedly hung in the ‘best rooms’ of Baltimore’s society elite in the late 18th and early 19th centuries; among his commissions were portraits of the city’s ‘civic, military and mercantile families.’”[20] The book Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter takes pains to recreate where Johnson lived in Baltimore and who lived near him. In one essay in this book, Carolyn J. Weekley notes that Johnson lived in an area of town surrounded by abolitionists who would have been supportive of Johnson’s work. 
This was also true for other African-American artists. In the article “Race Identity / Indentifying Race: Robert S. Duncanson and Nineteenth-Century American Painting” the author Margaret Rose Vendryes notes that Duncanson’s

presence in abolitionist circles enabled the artist to market his work to the audiences who were most disposed to receive it well. When his blackness brought commercial advantages such as abolitionist patronage and exhibition venues, being a freeman of color was an asset rather than a liability. There existed a complementary arrangement between abolitionist patrons and the black artists they supported, an arrangement that furthered the professional progress of the latter and improved the moral standing of the former.[21]

This page has paths: