BENJAMIN FRANKLIN YOE AND SON

At the age of nineteen, Joshua Johnson, the son of a free white man and an enslaved African-American woman, was freed by his father and apprenticed to a blacksmith.  Joshua’s skill and ambition as a painter, however, led him to become one of Baltimore’s most prolific artists.  Johnson specialized in painting the city’s successful artisan class, as this portrait of the well-to-do tailor, Benjamin Franklin Yoe (b. 1775), and his son, Benjamin, Jr, (b. 1804) exemplifies.