Joshua Johnson and the Making of Early American Portraiture
For decades, Joshua Johnson existed at the edge of the historical record. Today, he is recognized as the first Black professional artist in the United States — a figure whose career illuminates both the exclusions of early American art and the persistence required to recover it.
Johnson was born into slavery around 1763 in or near Baltimore, Maryland. His father was George Johnson, a white man who purchased him in 1764 from William Wheeler Sr. for £25. A manumission document dated 1782 later granted Joshua his freedom once he reached 21 or completed a blacksmithing apprenticeship, whichever came first.
What happened in the years that followed remains partly obscure. The archival trail resumes in 1796, when Johnson appears in the first Baltimore City Directory as a painter and portraitist. In a 1798 advertisement in the Baltimore Intelligencer, he described himself as “a self-taught genius,” noting the obstacles he had faced while pursuing his art. That language suggests both ambition and a practical understanding of painting as a trade in the 18th century, when the line between fine art and craft was far less rigid than it is today.
Johnson’s work was rediscovered in the late 1930s by J. Hall Pleasants, the art historian and genealogist who identified him as the maker of a number of 19th-century portraits of prominent Baltimoreans. Further documentation emerged in the mid-1990s from manuscripts in the Maryland Historical Society, deepening the picture of an artist whose life had long been fragmented by the archive.
About 83 works are now attributed to Johnson, though only one is signed. His portraits are typically composed in three-quarter profile, with restrained modeling and flat or nearly flat backgrounds. The power of the paintings lies in their precision: lace, sheer fabric, strands of hair, flower petals, and the textured surfaces of strawberries are rendered with unusual care. The sitters are often members of Maryland’s upper class, including families whose names recur across collections at the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, and the Minneapolis Institute of Art.
Johnson’s importance extends beyond attribution. His career offers a rare view into early American portraiture as both an artistic practice and a social record, shaped by enslavement, mobility, and the fragile survival of evidence. In that sense, his paintings do more than preserve likenesses. They restore a missing chapter in the history of American art.
