John Johnston, an artist for the needleworker

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch

John Johnston of Boston, whom the Massachusetts Centinel o November 4, 1789, called one of "the two best portrait painters in th[at] metropolis," painted on board and canvas a virtual who's who of the Boston region from about 1780 until at least 1812.(1) His sitters included Increase Sumner (1746-1799), Samuel Dexter (1725 or 1726-1810), John Lowell (1743-1802), John Gore (1718-1796), and Samuel Adams (1722-1803), as well as the city's most eminent visitor, George Washington, who was in Boston in October 1789. The Massachusetts Centinel reported that both Johnston and Christian Gullagher (1789-1826), the other "best portrait painter," would take the president's likeness, "the portrait which Mr. Johnston is to draw is designed for Fanueil Hall...[as] requested by the Selectmen of this town."(2)

Johnston's portrait painting extended to painting miniature likenesses on both ivory(3) and silk, the latter incorporated into patterns for schoolgirl embroideries. In this he was not alone, for during the 1790s portrait painters in miniature, many of them English and French, emigrated in great waves to America, bringing with them a predilection for combining paint and silk. The competition for business was so great that many of these artists were forced to seek alternative sources of income; in addition to portraits and fancy and mourning pictures on ivory, they began painting patterns on silk for needlework. They were able to take advantage of the proliferation at the time of schools for girls, where the curriculums generally included working elaborate silk embroideries. By promoting sales of their needlework patterns, they not only promoted their own businesses but also brought high style to American needlework. One J. Williams, boasting of his membership in the Royal Academy of Arts in London, advertised in the Massachusetts Mercury on January 17, 1800, that he could provide "Designs and Patterns of all kinds, painted or outlined on Silk or Sattin, to fill up with needlework, as is now practised by Ladies of the first distinction in Europe."

Clearly, such advertising stimulated even further the existing market for needlework. While this market continued to be exploited throughout the country well into the 1820s(4) the large number of schools for young women in or near Boston in the first decades of the nineteenth century(5) provided a particularly strong market for artists proffering patterns for aspiring needleworkers. Many advertised that they could fill the demand, among them the miniaturists Nathaniel Hancock (w. 1792-1809), Henry Williams (1787-1830), and William M. S. Doyle (1769-1828),(6) but the most prodigious provider of these patterns was Johnston, judging by my extensive comparative analysis between actual portraits signed by or attributed to him and a vast number of embroideries with Boston associations. In this article, I will identify the salient characteristics of Johnston's work as well as some of the sources for his designs.(7)

It should perhaps be no surprise that Johnston was active in the needlework-pattern market. He was apprenticed to the heraldic painter John Gore, who had painted needlework patterns from about 1750. His own father, Thomas Johnston (1708-1767), also a heraldic painter, almost certainly provided needlework patterns in order to keep up with his competitors - Gore and David Mason. The latter advertised in the Boston Gazette on December 18, 1758, that he did "coats of arms, Drawings on Sattin or Canvas for Embroidering."

The skills of the portrait miniaturist were particularly important to American schoolgirl embroideries because many of the compositions were memorials or conversation pieces that incorporated precise likenesses. Unlike in England, where memorials in needlework usually honored national figures, in America they were usually to individuals, and the mourners depicted were frequently representations of actual family members. However, the inclusion of actual portraits in needlework compositions was not an exclusively American practice. While for the most part the figures in English needlework of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries were either biblical or allegorical, a number took on the visages of real people, particularly, in the seventeenth century, Charles I and Henrietta Maria and Charles II and Catherine of Braganza,(8) and a few included likenesses of less-exalted individuals.(9)

The paintings and silk embroideries illustrated in this article represent but a small number of the compositions analyzed in determining Johnston's style,(10) but they are more than adequate for identifying all the most important features of his work. On canvas there are portraits of John Peck [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE II OMITTED], Judge David Sewall [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IV OMITTED], an unknown elderly gentleman [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VII OMITTED], Byfield Lyde [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE IX OMITTED], Mrs. Jacob Gill [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE X OMITTED], Mrs. Samuel Hill [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XII OMITTED], a Miss Wright [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XV OMITTED], and General Jacob Gill [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XVII OMITTED], all painted between about 1788 and 1806. The silk embroideries, all of which were worked between about 1800 and 1812, include memorials to Washington [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES I, XIX, AND XXVII OMITTED]; a memorial to Hannah Kuhn [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XVIII OMITTED] that incorporates what are undoubtedly actual likenesses of her husband, Jacob [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE III OMITTED], and her children Anne [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE VI OMITTED] and George [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATE XIII OMITTED]; and a needlework picture entitled Miranda, depicting a scene from Shakespeare's Tempest [ILLUSTRATION FOR PLATES XVI AND XXVI OMITTED].(11)