Joshua Johnson, one of the more elusive yet succesful American portrait painters, was a free African-American working in Baltimore, Maryland, during the last years of the 18th century and into the first quarter of the 19th. Recent scholarship on the artist has shown that
not only did Johnson paint many of his neighbours in the Fell's Point
area of Baltimore in which he lived, but it has also suggested that he may have studied with members of the Peale family, whose patriarch,
Charles Willson Peale, is one the most popular American painters of
Revolutionary era. In addition, the costume of the boy illustrated
here may relate him to the portrait of (see, Maryland Historical Society, Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Portrait Painter (Baltimore, 1988))