Henrietta Johnston
Henrietta Johnston
ca. 1674 - aft. 1729
American pastellist. In 1694 she married Robert Dering (d between 1698 and 1702), and then on 11 April 1705 she married Gideon Johnston, with whom she emigrated the same year from Ireland to Charleston, SC. Her second husband, an Anglican clergyman, received a position at Charleston, but his salary was poor, and Henrietta eased their financial problems by making and selling modestly priced portraits in pastel, which proved popular. No record exists of any art training, but her early work in Ireland resembles the portraits of Godfrey Kneller, and her pastel technique has much in common with that of Edward Luttrell, an English painter in Dublin. Her portraits, almost always bust-length and normally 229×305 mm, are dated and signed on the back of the wooden frames that she apparently provided. Among the 40 known portraits, she seldom showed the hands of her sitters and favoured a dark and undefined background that accented her sculptural treatment of the clothing. Strong shadows relieved by bright touches of white suggest the sheen of satin and other fine cloth worn by her subjects. The most characteristic feature of her style, the large liquid dark eyes, have a bright highlight on the left side, suggesting lighting from that direction. She worked only in Charleston, except for some work in New York dated 1725. Most of the pastels are in private collections, with some in the Carolina Art Association (Charleston, SC, Gibbes A. Mus.) and the Museum of Early Southern Decorative Arts, Winston-Salem, NC. [Darryl Patrick. "Johnston, Henrietta." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T045055.]
Person TypeIndividual
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French, 1864 - 1901
