Emma Van Name

This compelling portrait of a Maryland toddler is widely regarded as an icon of American folk painting. Included in numerous international exhibitions since its discovery in the late 1950s by New York’s primary folk and modernist dealer, Edith Halpert, it is now accepted as an important work by Joshua Johnson, the earliest known professional African American painter. Son of a white man and an unidentified enslaved mother, Johnson apprenticed to a blacksmith before achieving his freedom in 1782, becoming part of Baltimore’s large free black population. "Emma Van Name" is arguably his most ambitious and engaging portrait of an individual child. Distinguished by a bravura demonstration of the presumably self-taught artist’s talent and imaginative flair in its nuanced palette, compositional complexity, deft handling of details, and surreally scaled goblet that incongruously comes to the subject’s waist, the work suggests the particular appeal of historical folk painting to early twentieth-century modernists.