Piccolo Art is pleased to be able to move into a new area of African American Art from the 18th & 19th centuries. In our move to North Carolina we ahve become aware of the African American community and the role it played in our nations history.
Since portraitture was often a symbol of status and wealth very little portraiture of African American was created or surives. There are of course some notable exceptions including the first professional African American portrait artis Joshua Johnson.
Johnson:The earliest documented professional African American artist, Joshua Johnson (whose last name sometimes appears as Johnston) worked as a portrait painter in Baltimore, where he produced more than eighty known works between 1795 and 1825. He may have begun life as a slave, but Johnson was certainly a free man by 1795, when he advertised himself as a self-taught "genius" in the Baltimore Intelligencer.
We saw his work at the Philadelphia Art Museum.
Piccolo Art has acquired a number of pieces through the years and the current primative is certainly an exciting find.
American primitive school. Oil on canvas. An amazing historic document in the form of a portrait of an African-American share-cropper. The 19th Century portrait, which is in very good condition, was quite incredibly found in a barn in Maine. The portrait depicts a woman, standing by a cabin, in a vividly painted landscape, reminescent of Western North Carolina, with crops, a cabin, mountains, and a sunset beyond
There are a number of
