1. Mrs. Andrew Bedford Bankson and Son, Gunning Bedford Bankson, 1803/1805.
Joshua Johnson (c. 1770–after 1825).
Oil on canvas; 81.3 x 71.1 cm (38 x 32 in.). Restricted gifts of Robin and Timm Reynolds and Mrs. Jill Zeno; Bulley & Andrews, Mrs. Edna Graham, Love Galleries, Mrs. Eric Oldberg, Ratcliffe Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Robert O Delaney funds; Walter Aitken, Dr. Julian Archie, Mr. and Mrs. Perry Herst, Jay W. McGreevy, John W. Puth, Stone Foundation and Mr. and Mrs. Frederick G. Wacker endowments; through prior acquisitions of the George F. Harding Collection and Ruth Helgeson (1998.315).

Joshua Johnson was the first African American artist to gain prominence in the United States. Listed in the 1816 Baltimore city directory as a “free householder of Colour,” Johnson was likely of West Indian and French descent, and arrived in this country as a slave from St. Dominique (now Haiti) sometime after 1770. How he gained his freedom is not known precisely, but by 1798 he was advertising his skills as a “self-taught genius” in the Baltimore Intelligencer and residing in a neighborhood friendly to free blacks and popular with members of the Maryland Abolitionist Society. Unlike white itinerant portrait painters, including his mentor, Charles Peale Polk, Johnson could not travel to seek out commissions because of the threat of being kidnapped and sold back into slavery. At once free and confined, he was able, through his close ties to Baltimore Abolitionists, to attract local patrons. From the late 1790s through the first quarter of the nineteenth century, he produced likenesses of members of the city’s artisan and middle classes, such as the Bankson family, represented here.

The emphasis on fashion in Mrs. Andrew Bedford Bankson and Son, Gunning Bedford Bankson is characteristic of much of Johnson’s portraiture. The artist preferred, when permitted, to bedeck his female sitters with jewelry: in her portrait, Mrs. Bankson’s hair is bound with a double circlet of light, glass beads that accentuates her brown hair and gray eyes. Johnson depicted Mrs. Bankson in a light-brown garment with a lace ruffle around a low neckline. The child is clothed with an equal sense of fashion; he sports a high-waisted, white-muslin gown and holds in his right hand a strawberry, a brightly colored delicacy that Johnson often included in his portraits. (AJW)