Obelisk

In the early 1800s an itinerant artist painted a series of moody, arresting portraits of the Maryland elite. For more than a century the artist of these naïve portraits was unknown, until in 1939 the historian J. Hall Pleasants attributed them to a mysterious man named Joshua Johnson. In 1996 concrete information about Johnson finally emerged, when the Maryland Historical Society’s Department of Manuscripts discovered local historical records including Joshua Johnson’s manumission record. read more