Was Joshua Johnson Black?
The need for confirmation of Johnson’s ethnicity was an important one for museums and dealers. Not only did museums want to present truthful information to the public concerning the cultural climate of Baltimore and give due to an early African-American trailblazer, but they also wanted to make sure that the money they were spending to obtain a Johnson would be well spent. In 1988 the Whitney Museum sold its Joshua Johnson for $660,000.[10] The large amounts of money being spent were reflective of the scarcity of work by African-Americans from the time period that Johnson worked.
Another theory that got a lot of attention from authors surrounding Pleasants oral history information, was the question that perhaps Johnson was from the West Indies. Perry and other authors note that if this was true Johnson could have faced a more difficult time in establishing himself in society. Many whites at the time were fearful of being overrun by mutinous blacks from the Caribbean and West Indies where massive riots had taken place. Keeping this story in mind Carroll Greene Jr. put forth a sliver of evidence in that on one of Johnson’s canvases he spells “October” the French way, “Octbre”, allowing for the possibility that he was indeed from the West Indies and could speak French. The French rumors also lead some authors to connect Johnson with the Peales who owned a French speaking servant. Perry refutes this theory and any connection with the Peales because of a lack of documentation and Charles Willson Peale was a meticulous keeper of papers and “documented members of his household by carefully including them in the family statistics he kept in Pilkington’s Dictionary of Painters.”[22]
A book titled Six Black Masters of American Art by Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson from 1972 is an anomaly in the works I am looking at in that it is designed as an imaginative look at Black artists in history. Johnson is the first artist profiled in the book and the text starts with a narrative about Johnson working on his canvases with his son helping him. It begins:
...in spring of 1805, Joshua was planning a painting trip that would take him into Hartford County, north of Baltimore. ‘I want to go places where other painters haven’t been. That way I can do more likenesses,’ he had told his wife. Yet he did not relish the idea of going into plantation country, where he might be challenged to prove he was a free Black man. Mustn’t forget to take my freedom papers, he thought.[11]
The book Six Black Masters extends the tradition of including Johnson in African American artist survey books and exhibitions. Other early artists often mentioned with Johnson are Henry Ossawa Tanner, Robert Scott Duncanson, and Horace Pippin. This can be seen in the exhibit “Two centuries of Black American Art” that was organized by the L.A. County Museum of Art and in “Three Nineteenth Century Afro-American Artsts” (1980) by Cedar Rapids Art Center.