Museum accessions.

In the early years of the nineteenth century Baltimore was booming, a city alive with opportunities of all sorts, both commercial and social. It was home to Joshua Johnson, the first known African-American artist to earn his living as a portrait painter, who executed likenesses of the city's sea captains, shopkeepers, merchants, and prominent members of society. The Maryland Historical Society has acquired two fine examples of his work--portraits of Mary Anne Jewins and Charles Burnett. The Burnetts were married in 1792 and lived in Richmond, Virginia, until 1795 or 1798. In the latter year the first of their eight children was born in Piscataway, Maryland, where the family had a country estate. The Burnetts appear to have moved to Baltimore by 1800, when both parents first appear in city directories as tavern owners. Judging by his uniform in Johnson's portrait, Charles Burnett fought during the War of 1812. In their strong colors, direct frontal poses, and careful detailing, the Burnett likenesses are typic al of Johnson's best work. They descended in the Burnett family until acquired by the museum in honor of Stiles T. Colwill.

If the view of Asheville, North Carolina, in 1850 shown here reminds you of the work of the Hudson River school in general and of Thomas Cole in particular, you are on the right track. It was painted by Robert S. Duncanson, a great admirer of Cole's, whose fantastical trees he evidently studied with particular assiduity One of the first important African-American landscape painters, Duncanson was born in Fayette, Seneca County, New York, turned to painting after an apprenticeship as a carpenter and house painter, and subsequently moved to Mount Healthy Ohio, a town near Cincinnati, a city known for its cultural aspirations, strong antiabolitionist sympathies, and large black population. He painted portraits, copied prints of old master paintings, and then branched out into landscape painting on travels in Pennsylvania, North Carolina, New England, and, farther afield, in Scotland. He made the grand ...