Active in: England, Ireland, Colonial America
Alternate names: Henrietta Dering, Henrietta de Beaulieu

Biography

Henrietta Johnston is considered the earliest artist to work in pastels in colonial America. She was the first professional woman artist to pursue a career in colonial America and has been called the first portraitist of the American South. A practicing artist for nearly thirty years, Johnston’s career started somewhere between 1694 and 1703 and ended with her death in 1729. She began working in Ireland and later produced portraits in England, but most of her work was made in Charleston, South Carolina, where she lived from 1708 until her death in 1729. She was born around 1674 in Rennes, to Francis de Beaulieu and his wife Suzanne. They were a Huguenot family that emigrated to London around 1685 in the wake of Louis XIV’s revocation of the Educt of Nantes, which had protected their right to practice their Protestant faith.

Pastels were a popular medium in London in the 1680s and all of Johnston’s surviving works are pastel portraits on paper. In 1694, Johnston married Robert Dering (1669–1703) and their daughter Helena was born in 1697. Sometime after her birth, the family moved to Ireland where a second daughter, Mary, was born in 1700. Dering died in 1703, leaving Johnston a widow with two children to support. The earliest known portraits by Johnston are dated 1703, suggesting that she began to work as a professional artist to earn an income. Johnston’s daughter Helena died in 1704.

In 1705, Johnston married Gideon Johnston (1668–1716), the Vicar of Castlemore, and she began signing her portraits “Henrietta Johnston.” The family moved to London, where her husband sought to improve their financial situation. Sometime after 1705, Gideon reached out to the Anglican Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts in search of a new opportunity. In September 1707, they learned that he would be posted as the Bishop of London’s Commissary in Charleston (then called Charles Towne), South Carolina. They arrived in South Carolina in 1708, where they found very challenging circumstances. A rival pastor had installed himself and refused to give up his post and Gideon contracted malaria. Johnston’s earliest American portraits are dated 1708, likely because she needed to generate income for her family soon after their arrival. Among her earliest Charleston works are portraits of two fellow Huguenots, the DuBose sisters, Mary (Marie) and Judith. Both were stepdaughters of Dr. John Thomas, a physician. In 1711, Johnston returned to England to acquire more pastels and paper and to negotiate a higher salary for her husband. She spent two years in England but seems to have produced very few works during this period.

Soon after her return to South Carolina, Gideon left for England and when he returned in 1715, he found that his wife and other members of his parsonage were sheltered in place due to fighting between the Yamasee people and European colonizers. Gideon died in a boating accident in 1716 and Johnston remained in colonial America, living primarily in South Carolina but traveling to New York in 1725. She may have continued to work until her death in 1729 but her last known work is dated 1726. Her accomplishments as a portraitist were widely known and in 1770, Jonathon Armory commissioned John Singleton Copley (1738–1815) to copy a portrait that Johnston had made of his father, Thomas Armory (1682–1728).

Selected Works