Joshua Johnson also known as Joshua Johnston was a prominent African American folk artist in the 17th and 18th centuries. He was recognized as the first significant African American portrait painter. Some scholars believe that Johnson was born in the 1760s in the West Indies, and that he was the son of a white man named George Johnson and an unknown enslaved African woman. Though he was a mixed child he still faced the same adversities as any African at birth. He was sold for 25 pounds, but as he grew up, his mixed features dominated, and he was treated less harshly. Johnson was promised his freedom after completing a blacksmith apprenticeship or turning twenty-one, whichever came first. Johnson finished the apprenticeship and was freed in 1782.

There is some speculation that Johnson was a slave as a child to Robert Polk. Robert Polk is the brother-in-law of artists Charles Wilson Peale, a man …show more content…
It is indicating that the natural thing is to love your siblings. The children look directly out of the frame creating psychic lines making the viewer a part of the composition. The subjects are all dressed in the same outfit, high-wasted trouser suits and black boots. The use of space and generally flat subjects is also of great importance when analyzing this painting. Painting in the 18th century was characterized by portraits of the rich and wealthy and of landscapes. The paintings produced lacked visual space because they did not experiment with linear perspective. They portrayed space through the use of windows to give an allusion that there is something further in the painting. Joshua Johnson’s work mimics the painters of his time because of that reason, but also because he has to make himself appealing to the white people in order to be recognized as a successful artist. This rendering of visual space cause the painting to appear flat and this is also seen in Johnson’s “Family