The History of Black Portraiture

Black portraiture is the tradition of picturing Black people as full individuals rather than as types, running from Joshua Johnson's Baltimore portraits in the 1790s through Harlem Renaissance painting and studio photography to today's large-scale figurative painting. It's roughly 230 years old in the United States, and for most of that time it was made outside the institutions that now collect it.

That last part matters. The story isn't a smooth climb. It's a long stretch of Black artists building their own audiences, followed by a very recent scramble by museums to catch up.

Who was the first African American portrait painter?

Joshua Johnson, working in Baltimore, is the earliest African American known to have made a living as a professional artist. He was born into slavery around 1763 in or near Baltimore. By 1790 he appears in Baltimore city directories as a painter, and he worked for more than thirty years painting the city's merchant class: shipping men, importers, their wives, their children.

Here's the part that says something about how art history gets written. Johnson didn't sign or date most of his portraits. For over a century they were credited to white painters, or to nobody at all. It took until 1939, when the art historian and genealogist J. Hall Pleasants pieced the attribution together, for anyone to connect the paintings to a Black artist. His work now hangs in the National Gallery of Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Brooklyn Museum, and the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts.

So the first chapter of Black portraiture in America is a chapter about erasure and recovery. It sets a pattern that repeats.

How did photography change Black portraiture in the 1800s?

Photography arrived in America in 1839, and Black photographers were in the business almost immediately. That's not a footnote. A camera was a way into a trade that didn't require a white academy to admit you.

Augustus Washington learned to make daguerreotypes at Dartmouth to pay for his own tuition. He left in 1844 over debt, moved to Hartford, Connecticut, and opened a studio in 1846 that ran successfully for more than six years. He did something most daguerreotypists of the era didn't bother with: he stamped his name and Hartford address on the mounts and cases. That single business habit is why his authorship survived when so much of the period's photography came down to us anonymous. The National Portrait Gallery bought his quarter-plate daguerreotype of the abolitionist John Brown, made in Hartford around 1846 to 1847, in 1996. It's the earliest known likeness of Brown, and that one purchase is what pushed the museum to mount its first exhibition of Washington's work. In 1853 he emigrated to Liberia with his wife and two children and opened a studio in Monrovia.

James Presley Ball opened his first Cincinnati gallery in 1845. According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Ball worked alongside the landscape painter Robert S. Duncanson from about 1845 to 1855, and Ball's studio doubled as an exhibition space showing his own photographs next to Duncanson's paintings. A Black-run commercial gallery, in Cincinnati, in the 1850s.

Then there's the sitter side of it. Frederick Douglass sat for more separate photographic portraits than any other American of the nineteenth century, more than 160 distinct images. He wrote about portrait photography seriously, as a critic, because he understood exactly what he was doing with it. Every accurate photograph of a Black person contradicted the caricature that slavery depended on.

Sojourner Truth ran the same play as a business. In 1864 she copyrighted her own carte-de-visite portrait in her own name and sold copies to fund her speaking tours. The caption underneath reads: "I Sell the Shadow to Support the Substance." The Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture holds one, with the 1864 copyright notice still printed on the back. Read that as an artist statement about self-representation and it holds up better than most.

What did the Harlem Renaissance do for Black portraiture?

It made the Black subject the whole point rather than a curiosity in someone else's picture.

Archibald Motley painted his paternal grandmother in 1922, a woman born into slavery in Kentucky who later moved north to Chicago. The painting borrows the quiet domestic staging of seventeenth-century Dutch interiors and applies it to a Black woman in an armchair. Motley also made a deliberately uncomfortable series of portraits titled with antebellum Creole racial classifications, using those labels to expose the arithmetic of the one drop rule rather than to endorse it.

James Van Der Zee ran a Harlem studio and photographed the neighborhood as it saw itself: weddings, funerals, church groups, Marcus Garvey's UNIA, women in furs, men with cars. We've written more about how Van Der Zee built his Harlem studio practice if you want the longer version. In December 2021 the Metropolitan Museum of Art, in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem and Donna Van Der Zee, established the James Van Der Zee Archive: roughly 20,000 lifetime prints, 30,000 negatives, plus studio equipment and ephemera. It's only the third archive of an American photographer the Met has taken on, after Walker Evans and Diane Arbus.

Painting had an organized push too. In 1944 the Harmon Foundation commissioned Laura Wheeler Waring and Betsy Graves Reyneau to paint a series of portraits of accomplished living African Americans, with the stated goal of confronting racial prejudice by simply showing the sitters. The exhibition, Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origin, opened at the Smithsonian on May 2, 1944. Eleanor Roosevelt attended and endorsed it in her column the next day. It toured the country for about a decade. The sitters included W.E.B. Du Bois, James Weldon Johnson, George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Paul Robeson, and Brigadier General Benjamin O. Davis, the first African American general in the U.S. military. In June 1966, forty-one of the original fifty portraits were transferred to the National Portrait Gallery.

If you want the wider context around the painters and photographers of the period, our guide to the visual artists of the Harlem Renaissance covers who was working and where.

The Met's own 2024 exhibition, The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism, ran February 25 through July 28 and gathered around 160 works. It was the first museum survey of the subject in New York City since 1987. Thirty-seven years between surveys of a movement that reshaped modern art. That gap is the real headline.

Why did Black portraiture take so long to reach museums?

Because the institutions weren't looking, and the market followed the institutions.

Look at the retrospective timeline. Barkley Hendricks painted his life-size portraits of Black city dwellers through the late 1960s and 1970s, in oil, at full scale, with the compositional confidence of European court painting. His first career retrospective, Birth of the Cool, was organized by the Nasher Museum of Art at Duke and reached the Studio Museum in Harlem in fall 2008. That's roughly forty years into the work.

Charles White died in 1979. MoMA's Charles White: A Retrospective opened October 7, 2018, and the museum described it as the first major museum survey of his work in over thirty years.

Kerry James Marshall's Mastry opened at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in April 2016, traveled to the Met Breuer that October, and closed at MOCA Los Angeles in 2017. Marshall had been painting unapologetically Black figures in deep, saturated black pigment since the 1980s.

None of these artists needed discovering. They were found late.

Who are the major contemporary Black portrait artists?

The single most visible moment came on February 12, 2018, when the National Portrait Gallery unveiled Kehinde Wiley's portrait of Barack Obama and Amy Sherald's portrait of Michelle Obama. They were the first Black artists commissioned by the Smithsonian to paint an official presidential and first lady portrait. Attendance at the Portrait Gallery topped two million for fiscal 2018, and the museum had to move Sherald's painting to a bigger room to handle the crowds.

Sherald's first major museum survey, American Sublime, ran at the Whitney Museum of American Art from April 9 to August 10, 2025, with about fifty paintings covering 2007 onward.

Beyond those two, a short and verifiable list:

• Kerry James Marshall, whose figures are painted in an unmixed, emphatic black that refuses to be read as a shortcut.
• Lynette Yiadom-Boakye, whose Tate Britain retrospective Fly In League With The Night brought together over seventy paintings. Her subjects are invented, which turns the whole question of who gets painted inside out.
• Jordan Casteel, whose New Museum show Within Reach in early 2020 gathered nearly forty paintings of neighbors, street vendors, and her own students at Rutgers University-Newark.

If you want a plain-language breakdown of what unites this work formally, we've laid it out in our explainer on what Black figuration actually means.

What should you look for when buying Black portrait art?

Three practical things.

First, ask who made it and whether that person exists. The current flood of AI-generated "Black art" on print-on-demand sites is a direct insult to a 230-year tradition built on real people insisting on being seen accurately. If a seller can't name the artist, that's your answer.

Second, ask whether the artist gets paid. Sojourner Truth copyrighted her own image in 1864 for a reason. Artist royalties on every sale aren't a nice extra, they're the point.

Third, look at how the figure is treated. Strong portraiture gives you a specific person with a specific interior life, not a symbol or a silhouette. That's the line running from Joshua Johnson to Jordan Casteel.

We built our collection of Black portrait art on those rules. Noirci Studio is a Black-owned gallery selling African American art on archival canvas, printed to order in the USA, with a royalty paid to the artist on every sale. Founder Robert Lawrence has been painting since 2006. No AI-generated images, no mass-produced overseas prints.

What the tradition actually argues

Every figure in this history was making the same argument in different materials. Johnson made it with oil and a merchant's commission. Washington made it with a silvered copper plate and his name stamped on the case. Douglass made it 160 times over. Van Der Zee made it in a Harlem storefront. Wiley and Sherald made it on a wall in the Smithsonian.

The argument is that a Black face on a wall, painted or photographed with real attention, is not decoration. It's a record. That's why the work kept getting made even when nobody was collecting it, and it's why it's worth hanging now.

Sources

• Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery: Smithsonian magazine, "A Durable Memento," on the Portrait Gallery exhibition of Augustus Washington daguerreotypes curated by Ann M. Shumard; the Portrait Gallery's John Brown daguerreotype by Augustus Washington, NPG.96.123; "Fighting Prejudice through Portraiture with the Harmon Foundation Collection"; and the 2018 unveiling of the Obama portraits by Kehinde Wiley and Amy Sherald.
• National Gallery of Art: "Who Is Joshua Johnson? 7 Things to Know" and the museum's Joshua Johnson artist record.
• Smithsonian National Museum of African American History and Culture: carte-de-visite portrait of Sojourner Truth, object 2018.17.12, copyrighted by Truth in 1864.
• The Metropolitan Museum of Art: "The Harlem Renaissance and Transatlantic Modernism" (February 25 to July 28, 2024) and the announcement of the James Van Der Zee Archive, established December 2021 in partnership with the Studio Museum in Harlem.