Who Was the First Black Artist? The Earliest Name We Can Prove

Ask “Who was the first Black artist?” and the internet tends to serve a familiar roster: Joshua Johnson, Henry Ossawa Tanner, Robert Seldon Duncanson, even Aaron Douglas. Those names make sense because they sit inside the part of history that institutions can document cleanly: exhibitions, museums, movements, textbooks. The question feels answered until you realize the first Black artist might not be hanging in a gallery.

BAM250 starts in the Declaration era, yet Black artistry stretches far beyond 1776 and far beyond America itself, including ancient African traditions such as the Nok terracottas. After forced migration, Black making continued here, then collided with a record-keeping system that often preserved objects more reliably than names.

So here’s the promise. This is an investigation with rules. By the end, you’ll have one fair best answer you can repeat, plus a shortlist that shows how the evidence pushes earlier with every step. Our boundary for “first” is specific: the earliest documented Black visual artist working in the British North American colonies that later become the United States. Now let’s meet the suspects.

Suspect #1: The First Professional With a Real Market

Start with the version of art history shaped by galleries and portrait commissions, and Joshua Johnson feels like the answer. He built a portrait practice in Baltimore and advertised himself publicly as a working artist. In a 1798 newspaper advertisement, he described himself as a “self-taught genius” and referenced “insuperable obstacles” while pursuing his studies.

The Westwood Children, c. 1807, Joshua Johnson. Oil on canvas. National Gallery of Art, Washington. Gift of Edgar William and Bernice Chrysler Garbisch, 1959.11.1. Image courtesy National Gallery of Art, Washington.

If you want one image that shows why Johnson stays in the conversation, go straight to The Westwood Children. The painting reads as client-ready clarity: composed sitters, purposeful props, and a sense that portraiture could function as social proof inside a city that ran on reputation.

Johnson earns “first professional with a real market” in many readers’ minds, and he deserves the spotlight for that. The record also points to documented Black visual authorship earlier than his career, and the trail moves backward into the colonial era.

Suspect #2: The Enslaved Portraitist Who Changes the Clock

Portrait of William Duguid, 1773, Prince Demah Barnes. Oil on canvas. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 2010.105. Friends of the American Wing Fund, 2010.

Prince Demah Barnes changes the timeline in one move: 1773. The Met’s object record for Portrait of William Duguid (1773) identifies Demah as a painter of African descent active in Boston, enslaved by merchant Henry Barnes, and briefly trained in London after Barnes recognized his talent. The same record describes him as the only enslaved portraitist working in colonial America whose paintings are known to have survived.

Demah’s portrait sits inside the Atlantic world of refinement and commerce, which makes the tension sharp: the sitter’s status is the subject, while the maker navigated bondage. Demah is early, documented, and surviving.

So why does the investigation keep going? Because painting is only one lane of visual authorship, and another lane traveled farther and faster.

Suspect #3: The Image That Traveled Faster Than the Artist

Phillis Wheatley (frontispiece to Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral), 1773, attributed to Scipio Moorhead. Engraving. The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York, 49.40.24. The Elisha Whittelsey Collection, The Elisha Whittelsey Fund, 1949.

In 1773, Phillis Wheatley’s portrait traveled through print alongside the London publication of her poems. Print multiplies an image, preserves it, and moves it beyond one household. The Library of Congress record for the Wheatley engraving lists Scipio Moorhead as creator and gives a publication date of Sept. 1, 1773. The Met’s object entry frames Moorhead as an enslaved artist who knew Wheatley and possibly drew the portrait in Boston before it was engraved in London.

This is where “firstness” gets slippery. A printed image passes through drawing, engraving, publishing, captioning, cataloging, and later scholarship. Credit can shift along that chain. A careful scholarly account of the Moorhead evidence and the limits of attribution appears in Eric Slauter’s chapter “Looking for Scipio Moorhead.”¹

Wheatley’s frontispiece leaves a clue bigger than any single name: distribution systems shape authorship. Print can amplify a maker, and print can blur a maker. The next clue pushes us into a material built to outlast paper.

Suspect #4: The Maker History Called Something Else

Now we leave the parlor portrait world and walk into a burial ground in Newport, Rhode Island. At God’s Little Acre, part of Newport’s Common Burying Ground, the National Trust points to a Black stone carver connected to the John Stevens Shop and notes that his signature may be the earliest surviving mark of any African American artisan.

Then the object record does what the archive rarely does for early Black makers: it pins a date and a named hand to a surviving work. Reed College’s Colonial Gravestone Database catalogs the Gravestone of Cuffe Gibbs (1768) and identifies the creator in its entry.

Here is the clue that changes everything: a signed gravestone is public visual authorship in a material that resists time. If the earliest dated, documented Black visual work in the colonies lives here, the “first Black artist” story ends in stone. So who was the carver?

The Reveal: The Best “First” We Can Name Fairly

Pompe Stevens is the earliest documented named Black visual artist working in the British North American colonies that later become the United States, based on surviving gravestone work dated 1768 in reputable object records.

Gravestone of Cuffe Gibbs (1768), carved by Pompe Stevens. Digital photograph © Laura Leibman. Courtesy Reed College, Indian Converts Website and Archive: project; item record.

That answer feels surprising because many readers equate “artist” with easel painting and museum wall labels. The evidence pushes in a different direction: carving, lettering, design, and composition in public space function as visual authorship, and the archive preserves them with dates and signatures more reliably than many paintings.

Inside this boundary, Stevens gives you the cleanest “first” you can stand behind. At the same time, the other suspects keep their own powerful firsts: Johnson as an early documented professional Black portrait painter with a sustained market practice in the early republic; Demah as a rare surviving colonial portraitist working while enslaved; and the Wheatley frontispiece as foundational Black image circulation in print tied to a named Black maker in catalog records, with attribution complexities worth treating seriously.

What This Mystery Teaches About Black Art History

This is what “first” stories reveal: institutions preserve what they value, and the archive rewards materials that survive. Paintings often survive through wealth, storage, and later collecting. Prints survive through circulation and libraries. Stone survives because it was built to outlast weather and time.

It also shows how the category “artist” gets policed. Stone carvers become “artisans.” Potters become “craft.” Quilters become “folk.” Meanwhile, the work keeps doing what art does: shaping memory, shaping meaning, shaping public life. BAM250 will treat these labels as part of the story, since early Black art history often lives at their edges.

Next, we follow the portrait boom as a survival technology, because faces and names became a way to force the record to hold.

BAM250 Takeaways

• “First” depends on evidence, and evidence depends on what survives.

• Early Black visual authorship shows up in paint, print, and public objects.

• Signatures and documentation shape what future timelines can prove.

• Collectors and curators: build early timelines that include design, carving, and craft alongside painting.

• Artists: leave a trail your work can carry, including clear credit and durable records.

• Culture readers: portraits tell one story of early Black visibility; stone and print tell others.

Sources and Further Reading

• National Trust for Historic Preservation: God’s Little Acre — Best for Pompe Stevens context, site history, and why signatures matter in the archive.

• Reed College Colonial Gravestone Database: Gravestone of Cuffe Gibbs (1768) — Best for a dated object record tied to Stevens as creator.

• Smithsonian American Art Museum: Joshua Johnson — Best for baseline biography and institutional framing of his career.

• National Park Service: Joshua Johnson, Artist — Best for readable context on the 1798 advertisement language.

• National Gallery of Art: Who Is Joshua Johnson? 7 Things to Know — Best for a modern synthesis that places Johnson inside a broader early timeline.

• NGA object page: The Westwood Children — Best for one concrete Johnson work reference and object-level details.

• The Met object page: Portrait of William Duguid — Best for verified facts on Prince Demah Barnes and the 1773 anchor.

• Library of Congress: Phillis Wheatley engraving record (1773) — Best for catalog credit language and publication dating.

• The Met: Phillis Wheatley (print) — Best for institutional framing of the production and attribution story.

• Eric Slauter (Cambridge Core): Looking for Scipio Moorhead — Best for scholarly method around Moorhead evidence and attribution limits.

• The Met: Nok terracottas — Best for a concrete reference point for African artistry long before the colonial record.

¹ Note: The Wheatley image involves a chain of production across drawing, engraving, and publishing; attribution language varies across records and scholarship. The Slauter chapter offers a useful evidence-first approach to that debate.