Mrs. Abraham White and Daughter Rose

Oil on canvas Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch 74.6.12 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. The Chrysler portrait depicts Martha Bussey White (1778-1809) and one of her seven children, Rose Elizabeth (1807-1875). Martha's husband, Abraham White, owned a grocery store in Baltimore. Johnson painted Martha and her daughter around 1808-09, about the time of Rose's second birthday and shortly before Martha's untimely death at age thirty.

74.6.12