John Johnston, an artist for the needleworker

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1997 by Davida Tenenbaum Deutsch

It is very possible that Johnston, like some schoolgirls who made their own patterns, sometimes traced a print to produce the pattern for an embroidery, rather than drawing it freehand. For instance, in one of the embroideries based on Savage's Washington Family Martha Washington's right hand is rendered exactly as awkwardly as it is in the print. Every nuance of the Miranda engraving is duplicated in the embroidery after it, which would suggest that the pattern was traced, except for the fact that the print and the needlework are of different sizes. However, since a great many Boydell prints were issued in two sizes, it is possible that a larger version of the Miranda engraving was also produced.

Johnston probably worked with a great many needlework instructors in Boston, but the embroideries illustrated here may have been worked under the guidance of a single teacher, judging by similarities in the needlework itself.(22) They are related to an embroidery worked about 1804 by a Mary Lyman, which according to Abby Wright (1774-1842), a teacher in South Hadley, Massachusetts, was "executed at a celebrated school in Boston.... The expense of drawing and painting the faces was eight dollars and six months spent in Boston in working it."(23) The identity of this celebrated Boston teacher is still open to question; among the contenders are Elizabeth Douglass, Susanna Draper, Hannah Gray, and Hannah Moody, all of whom taught throughout the period covered by the embroideries.(24)

It is no wonder that Johnston's patterns for the needleworker were so popular. Not only does he appear to have had an extensive portfolio of prints from which to draw for inspiration, but his skill as a miniaturist allowed him to create magic with his brush. The faces that are undoubtedly actual portraits are beautifully and delicately rendered, and the stock figures have a classic Federal elegance. What more could a needleworker have wanted in her pattern?

1 See Frederick W. Coburn, "The Johnstons of Boston, Part Two," Art in America, vol. 21, no. 4 (October 1933), pp. 132-138; and Inventory of American Paintings, National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., pp. 14,320-14,327. Johnston's last entry in Boston directories was in 1809, but the likeness of his niece, Mrs. Edward Hallam, dates from 1812 (Catalogue of American Portraits in the New-York Historical Society [Yale University Press, New Haven, Connecticut, 1974], vol. 1, pp. 318-319).

2 Washington himself noted in his diary on October 27, 1789: "when the committee from the Town presented their Address, it was accompanied with a request (in behalf they said, of the ladies) that I would set to have my Picture taken for the Hall, that others might be copied from it" (quoted in John Hill Morgan and Mantle Fielding, The Life Portraits of Washington and Their Replicas [Philadelphia, 1931], p. 152). Morgan and Fielding identified Gullagher's portrait in reference to this quotation, apparently unaware of the Massachusetts Centinel reference to Johnston's likeness of washington (the whereabouts of which is unknown).