J. Hall Pleasants and Joshua Johnson
Pleasants was heavily involved in the art world of Baltimore in the late 1930s and was among the trustees of the Baltimore Museum of Art which at the time of Pleasants’ discovery of Johnson was in the process of arranging an exhibition of contemporary African-American artists’ work. The exhibition was preceded by exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art that featured the work of William Edmonson (in 1935) and Horace Pippin (in 1937).[1] The Baltimore Museum of art held its exhibition the same year that Pleasants first published his findings on Johnson. In historiographic terms this timing coincides with the apex of the progressive historians who were interested in “discontinuity” and social conflict.[2] Such interest would wane in the post World War II years as American historians embraced the new consensus history, only to see a new flurry of interest with ascendance of social and cultural history in the last thirty years.
Pleasants uses the method of connoisseurship in his investigation of Johnson’s work. He outlines meticulously the (scant) documentary evidence he found in the Maryland Historical Society, mostly from census records, that first mention Johnson in Baltimore in 1796 and continue until 1825. Pleasants also relies on birth dates of many of the children in the paintings to ascertain dates of production. The lack of documentation available to Pleasants means that he learns about who Johnson might have been from stories passed down through descendants of the sitters. These stories differ tremendously and raise many questions and much interest in not just the biographical particulars of Johnson, but also his painting practice, other working artists at the time, what life would have been like for a free black person in Baltimore, and what life was like in Baltimore in general.
Pleasants wrote down the dates, dimensions, descriptions, and provenance for each of the thirteen canvases he had attributed to Johnson. We see many of the themes and conjectures about Johnson’s life emerge in this article that are continued throughout other writings on the artist. There are claims that Johnson came to Baltimore from the West Indies, but most people Pleasants talked to thought he was an American born slave, though they were never consistent on who his owner was. In the 1817 city directory he was listed as a “Free householder of colour”. This was the only census that had a separate section for free blacks. In other censuses Johnson is listed as white. Pleasants conjectures this was because of his light skin and it would be more trouble than it was worth to mistakenly report a white man as black then vice versa. He was consistently listed as a portrait painter so we are sure that he did make enough money from his trade to live on.
Through the 1940s, Pleasants continues to produce small articles about Johnson and in 1948 he authors a catalog that accompanied an exhibit of Johnson’s portraits at the Peale Museum. At the time of this exhibit the number (for something that can be quantified specifically vs. a general amount of something) of paintings attributed to Johnson had increased to 25.[8]