Joshua Johnson (Johnston)
MSA SC 3520-13555
African American artist
Biography:
Joshua Johnson was a portrait painter that spent his career in Baltimore, Maryland painting for some of the most prominent families in the area. Born in 1763, Joshua Johnson was the son of a white man named George Johnson and an unnamed slave woman owned by William Wheeler Sr. In 1782, a Bill of Sale and Manumission were submitted by George Johnson purchasing the nineteen-year-old Mulatto Joshua Johnson for £25, apprenticing him to a local blacksmith named William Forepaw, and acknowledging him as his son.1 Unfortunately, the only other record George Johnson appears on is the 1733 Tax List placing him in the Back River Hundred in Baltimore County. There have been some conflicting tales passed down from the families in which Johnson painted for discussing how he came to Baltimore, although none have been confirmed. Some have said that he was a slave to the Peale family, some felt that he could have been a "Redman" that later died from consumption, others felt that he was a Creole from the West Indies that arrived in Baltimore with the influx of immigrants who fled Haiti during the slave revolts. More research is needed in order to confirm or deny these claims.2
Joshua Johnson first appears in the Baltimore City Directory in 1796 living on German Street between Hanover Street and Howard Street, and list his profession as a portrait painter.3 It is unknown how or who trained Johnson as a painter, but many feel that some of his works resemble techniques used by the famous Maryland artists family, the Peales. Some of the characteristics of Johnson's work include portraying his subjects in a stiff manner with rigid arms, legs and mouths, almost all of the faces are three-quarters full with direct eyes stairing toward the viewer, and two-dimensional scenes with dark backgrounds. Over half of his subject were children, and almost all of his paintings contain items such as musical instruments, flowers and fruit, various tools such as sextants and reading glasses, books, family pets, and Joshua Johnson paid particular attention to the details of the furniture and windows(including the environments viewed through the windows). Johnson painted some family portraits of Baltimore's elite including the Moales (it is believed that he stayed in a back room of the Moale's while they lived on German Street), the Gustins (the portrait of Sarah Odgen Gustin is the only portrait which bears his signature), the Everetts, the McCormicks, and he also painted two African-Americans, one was unnamed, and the other was the Methodists Reverend Daniel Coker who preached at Sharp Street Church School during the 1800s.4
During his thirty-year career in Baltimore, Joshua Johnson was a permanent resident of the city, living mostly in Fells Point and Old Town Baltimore. City Directories between 1796 and 1824 place him at various street near the basin of the northwest branch of the Patapsco River. In 1802, the directory shows Joshua Johnson living on Gay Street and Harrison Street by the Jones Falls, he stayed there until 1810 when Johnson moved to Old Town Baltimore on High Street where Baltimore's Little Italy neighborhood stands today. Joshua Johnson briefly stayed nearby in Fells Point before returning to Old Town in 1817, living on Nelson Street. The last entry in the City Directory for Joshua Johnson places him on Sleigh's Lane east of Spring Street, north of the city dock.5
Little is known about the later years of Joshua Johnson's personal or
professional life, and there are no vital records, wills, land records,
or inventories known to exists. Registers of St. Peter's Roman Catholic
Church in Baltimore mention Joshua Johnson and his first wife Sarah, c.
1785. It lists that they had four children, two sons and two daughters,
both daughters passed away at young ages.6 By 1803, Johnson
was married to a woman named Clara, but nothing more is known about the
couple. Joshua Johnson also placed a couple of advertisements in
local newspapers, one of the first African-Americans to do so. On
19 December 1798, he advertised himself as a "self-taught genius" and "having
experienced many insuperable obstacles in the pursuit of his studies."7
Joshua Johnson disappears from records after 1825, and nothing is
known about where he lived after he moved away from Baltimore, and how
and when he died. It was not until 100 years after Joshua Johnson's
passing that researchers came to know about Johnson and his contribution
to the arts in Baltimore until J. Hall Pleasant's article in the Maryland
Historical Magazine in 1942.
Notes:
1. Found in the first of three books privately donated to the Maryland Historical Society by M. Peter Moser in July 1994. Books date are from 1773-1784, 1785-1788, and 1811-1812. Record noted found on pages 299-300. For more information about the donation, refer to Jennifer Bryan and Robert Torchia's "The Mysterious Portraitist Joshua Johnson," Archives of American Art Journal, Vol. 36, No. 2 (1996), 3.
2. Weekley, Carolyn J., Stiles Tuttle Colwill, et. al., Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American portrait Painter (Williamsburg, VA.: Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Center; Baltimore: Maryland Historical Society, 1987) 35-43.
3. 1796 Baltimore City Directory. Found at the Maryland State Archives, Baltimore City (Directories), 1752, 1796-1860, sc2898, mf2856 (microfiche).
4. For more information on all of Joshua Johnson's works, refer to J. Hall Pleasant, "Joshua Johnson, the First American Negro Portrait Painter, " Maryland Historical Magazine 37 (June 1942): 121-149.
5. Baltimore City (Directories), 1752, 1796-1860, sc2898, mf2856 (microfiche).
6. Special Collections (Co-Cathedral Collection) 1782-1811, MSAM 1510.
7. Baltimore Intelligencer, December 19, 1798.
The other was on October 11, 1802 in the Baltimore Telegraphe.
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