MS01.01.03.B01.F25.036

10

The earliest known portrait of a black person by a black artists
is attributed to Joshua Johnston, a Baltimore painter. Numerous
questions have been raised about Johnston's life, his career as an
artists and more recently about his race. But there now can be little
or no doubt that the former slave artist to whom the late Dr. J. Hall
Pleasants attributed the painting (SLIDE #13) [u]Portrait of A Cleric[/u],
in the collection of the Bowdoin College Museum of Art, was indeed
the black painter whose identity was revealed through listings in
the Baltimore City directories from 1796 to 1824.7 The subject of
this work is not known by name yet the record does indicated that
Johnston was an established painter in Baltimore when Richard Allen
and other black ministers from Philadelphia frequently travelled to
Baltimore to ensure the planting of African Methodism in the minds
of the black residents of the port city. Johnson may have known
several of the community ministers and likely requested a setting
of the black cleric who poses without props for this painting done
between 1805-1810.

Johnston harbored no illusions about his own worth and for a
man so near the ongoing curses slavery brought, he sought to
completely emancipate himself as an artist and as a human being.
He was a limner of successful accomplishments equal to most who
lived during his lifetime. We further assume that since his style
is closely associated with those painters who studied with or who
were under the influence of Charles Willson Peale that he too must
have been under the tutelage of the acknowledged Baltimore master.