2-859-480 - Heritage Art/Heritage Images

Elizabeth Grant Bankson Beatty (Mrs. James Beatty) and her daughter Susan, c. 1805. Elizabeth Beatty was the wife of a Baltimore merchant, who owned the Bellona Gunpowder Factory. Here she wears a short-sleeved dress with gathered bodice and a circlet of glass beads in her hair. The child wears a muslin gown and holds a strawberry. The painter Joshua Johnson was a freed slave, and became the first known African American painter to gain professional recognition in the United States.