Joshua Johnson portrait woman
Portrait of Elizabeth Wise Chandler
Attributed to Joshua Johnson (c. 1763-1832), Baltimore, Maryland
c. 1820
oil on artist's board
20" x 14"
Provenance: Ann Elizabeth (Chandler) Bandel (1817-1900), daughter of sitter; Mary Elizabeth (Bandel) Hakesley (1837-1932), daughter; Grace (Hakesley) Bryn (1874-1957), daughter; Private Collection; sold, Freeman’s, 20 November 2010, lot 41
Exhibition: Baltimore, Maryland, Maryland Historical Society, and traveling, “Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter,” 26 September – 3 January 1988.
Literature: Carolyn Weekley and Stiles Colwill, eds., Joshua Johnson: Freeman and Early American Portrait Painter (1987), pp. 164-165, cat. no. 82; Philip Wingard, “From Baltimore to the South Carolina Backcountry: Thomas Chandler’s Influence on 19th-Century Stoneware,” Ceramics in America 2013, Robert Hunter, ed., p. 40, fig.3.
This captivating portrait of Mrs. Elizabeth Wise Chandler is by Joshua Johnson, who is the earliest documented professional African-American painter in the United States. Active in Baltimore during the late 18th through the first quarter of the 19th centuries, Johnson’s background largely remains a mystery. He is listed in Baltimore city directories and census listings as a “limner” or “portrait painter” and appears in the 1817 city directory among the “free households of Color” listed separately in the publication.
Although he signed only one known painting, over eighty portraits have been identified as by Johnson’s hand. Most of these works share stylistic similarities, with many sitters depicted three-quarter length with a straightforward gaze against a plain background holding distinctive props, including bowls or baskets or sprigs of strawberries, cherries or flowers.
Elizabeth Wise married Thomas Chandler, Sr., a Windsor chairmaker, in Baltimore in 1802. The couple returned to Chandler’s family home in Accomack on the Eastern Shore, where their son Thomas Chandler, Jr., was born in 1810. The family moved back to Baltimore in 1817 and it is very likely that they, like several other of his subjects, were neighbors of Johnson. The younger Chandler would later move to Edgefield, South Carolina and establish a successful pottery. This portrait was included in the important 1987 exhibition on the artist and remained in the sitter’s family until 2010.
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