An African American Clergyman
This flattering portrait is one of two paintings of African Americans by black artist Joshua Johnson (who also went by the surname Johnston). The son of an enslaved black woman and a white man, who bought his son’s freedom in 1782, Johnson described himself in an advertisement in the Baltimore Intelligence in 1798 as a “Portrait Painter … a self-taught genius deriving from nature and industry his knowledge of the Art.” White merchant families in Maryland and Virginia held Johnson’s work in high regard and commissioned most of his thirty or so extant works. Bowdoin College Museum of Art, Brunswick, Maine. Museum Purchase, George Otis Hamlin Fund.