Mrs. Reverdy Johnson (Mary Mackall Bowie Johnson),

1840

Sully received one thousand dollars for his life-size portrait of Mary Johnson, making it among the leading Philadelphia artist’s most lucrative commissions. Mary was the wife of the statesman and lawyer Reverdy Johnson. Though opposed to slavery, Reverdy represented the slave-owning defendant in the landmark Dred Scott case of 1857, which held that enslaved persons could not be considered citizens even in free states, a decision that contributed to the Civil War. Sully’s romantic image belies such worldly concerns, depicting Mrs. Johnson in a vaguely classical setting that imparts an air of timelessness to the scene. By contrast, the contemporary Jamaican American artist Renée Cox foregrounds the issue of race in the large photograph installed nearby. Cox substitutes Black men and women for white males in her restaging of Howard Chandler Christy’s 1940 painting Signing of the Constitution, which enshrines a document that counted enslaved people as three-fifths of a person and restricted voting to property-owning white men.