Mrs. Abraham White and Daughter Rose, Joshua Johnson (1808)
The Baltimore painter Joshua Johnson was one of the most remarkable of America's nineteenth-century folk artists. The son of a white man and a black slave woman, he was one of the few artists of color working in the United States in the years following the Revolutionary War and the first free African-American portrait painter in this country to earn a professional reputation. Of the roughly eighty portraits by him that have survived, only two depict black sitters. The rest of his subjects were prosperous whites, mostly members of Baltimore's middle class of merchants and government officials.
