Maryland Historical Society documents reveal the identity of portraitist Joshua Johnson

What do you make of these portraits? Little girls with improbably large butterflies. What is that, by the way, an Atlas moth? Such is the work of Joshua Johnson, the first successful Black American portraitist. Well, successful, and Black... Until the 1990s the identity of the author of at least thirteen portraits remained a mystery; beyond his name, nothing was known of him. Then the Maryland Historical Society published documents from which it emerged that Johnson, the son of a Black slave woman and a white man, had been bought from a Baltimore farmer