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Who was Henrietta Johnston?

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Martha R. Severens

Rutledge relied on the work of several earlier researchers. In 1899 the Reverend Robert Wilson (1838-1924) compiled a list of fifteen extant South Carolina portraits by Johnson,(3) and a quarter of a century later Eola Willis, a painter, posited that Johnston was the first professional female painter in America and the first American pastellist - claims that remain unchallenged.(4) Shortly thereafter Homer Eaton Keyes, the founder of ANTIQUES, proposed and then rejected the theory that Johnston was an associate of the Venetian artist Rosalba Carriera (1675-1757), arguing that Johnston was already established in Charleston by the time Carriera popularized pastel drawing. On the basis of two pastels discovered in England, Keyes speculated that Johnston was an Englishwoman from the neighborhood of Surrey, possibly of French extraction. However, he was at a loss to explain how or why she traveled to South Carolina.(5)

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The questions about Johnston began again in 1980 when Christie, Manson and Woods auctioned the contents of Belvedere, a mid-eighteenth-century Irish country house, including nine pastels of members of the Southwell and Percival (or Perceval) families.(6) Stylistically, there was little doubt that these were by the artist. Six of them bore helpful inscriptions, such as the one on the back of Sir John Percival's portrait (Pl. III), which reads "Henrietta Dering Fecit/Dublin Anno 1705." A likeness of one of the Southwells is signed "Henrietta Johnston Fecit," her new surname reflecting her marriage in Dublin to Gideon Johnston on April 11, 1705.

More information came to light through the discovery of the 1746 will of Mary Dering (c. 1700-1747), a daughter of Henrietta and her first husband, Robert Dering (b. 1669), whom she had married in 1694. Having served as a dresser to the daughters of George II, Mary Dering had accumulated a sizable estate. To Countess Egmont, an aunt on her father's side, she left two "venns[?] done in Creons," which may be the pastel portraits of Philip Percival (1686-1748) and Sir John Percival (Pl. III).(7) To honor her mother, Mary Dering gave her "flat silver candlesticks and snuffers" to "Mrs. [W]Ragg in Charles Town, wife to Joseph Ragg, merchant," whose likeness Johnston had taken in 1719. To her aunt, "a sister of my mother living in the city of Gloucester whose maiden name was Ann de Beaulieu one hundred pounds."(8) Thus, almost accidentally, Johnston's maiden name became known, confirming Keyes's speculation that she was of French origin.

Professor Anne Crookshank of Trinity College in Dublin, while at work researching Irish artists, discovered the immigration records of 1687 that document the admission to England of Francis and Susanna de Beaulieu and their children Henry and Henrietta.(9) On the occasion of her marriage to Robert Dering, Johnston is described as the daughter of Susanna de Beaulieu, widow.(10) Assuming that she was about twenty years old at the time of the wedding, she was born sometime around 1674.

Pursuing the de Beaulieu genealogy has led to the suggestion that Johnston's family came from Quintin, near Rennes in northwestern France. Susanna, Henry, and Henrietta were prevalent names there in the late seventeenth century, and various members of the de Beaulieu family were Protestants who fled to England. Unfortunately, family and church records that might provide the date and place of Johnston's birth are incomplete for this period.(11)

Henrietta de Beaulieu Dering Johnston emerges as a remarkable artist who plied her craft to support her families on both sides of the Atlantic. When Robert Dering died sometime between 1698 and 1702, she may have had no other means of support.(12) In any case, she made pastel portraits of her first husband's relatives, who were members of the English gentry with appointments and property in Ireland. When Henrietta and Gideon Johnston came to South Carolina, dire necessity required that she supplement the family's income. Charleston was a pestilential colonial outpost where the Johnstons encountered devastating heat, the threat of invasion from the Yemassee Indians, and political difficulties among the parishioners of Saint Philip's Church. Because the Society of the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, a missionary division of the Church of England, was delinquent in remitting her husband's stipend, the Johnstons incurred significant debts. Gideon acknowledged Henrietta's contributions to their survival when he wrote to the society in 1709, "Were it not for the assistance my wife gives me by drawing pictures...I shou'd not have been able to live."(13) She may have executed portraits in exchange for goods and services as well as for money.(14) Three of her sitters were the DuBose sisters (see Pl. II), the stepdaughters of Dr. John Thomas (d. 1710), who attended the Johnstons in their many illnesses. If the pastels were not actual payment they may have been expressions of appreciation for the doctor's ministrations. As the Reverend Johnston wrote:

Who was Henrietta Johnston?

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 1995 by Martha R. Severens

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