The auction house had played the portrait prominently on its website. That was understandable since the artist who painted it and the subject were both famous African Americans.
The auction house expected it to bring in big bucks.
It was an oil painting of James Weldon Johnson, known for his poem “The Creation” and the song “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” (with his brother J. Rosamond). Figures in the painting seem to refer to the poem. The portrait was painted by artist Laura Wheeler Waring.
It was only the second time I had been at an auction when a Waring painting was sold. I was at Swann Auction Galleries in New York a few years ago when her oil painting “Rural Landscape,” a scene near her studio in Cheyney, PA, sold for $12,000 (with buyer’s premium). I’ve never been fortune enough to find a Waring on the walls of an auction house or buried in some old boxes. Woe is me.
The Johnson portrait was interesting because it was similar to one in the collection of the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian. Waring painted that one as part of a series titled “Portraits of Outstanding Americans of Negro Origins” commissioned by the Harmon Foundation in the 1940s. The foundation was founded in 1922 to honor African Americans in a variety of fields, including art. It was well-known for its art award shows; Waring won a gold medal in one of them in 1927.
Starting in 1944, the Harmon paintings – by Waring and white artist Betsy Graves Reyneau – toured the country for 10 years as a declaration against racial stereotyping by highlighting the accomplishments of African Americans through the dignified portraits of eminent people. There were originally 22 portraits and others were added over that period.
Together, they painted such people as Johnson, W.E.B. DuBois, Marian Anderson, George Washington Carver, Mary McLeod Bethune, Thurgood Marshall and Paul Robeson. When the exhibition was discontinued, 41 of the portraits went to the National Portrait Gallery, where a handful are on display. Anderson sat for the Waring portrait at her farm in the summer of 1944.
I became familiar with the series some years ago when black and white photo reproductions of the paintings were sold at auction, and I was outbidded on them.
Johnson was a poet, novelist, songwriter and civil rights activist who was a leader in the NAACP starting in the 1920s. He was born in 1871 to parents who enlightened both him and his brother J. Rosamond through music, reading and more. In 1900, he wrote the lyrics to “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing” to celebrate Abraham Lincoln at a school where he was principal, and his brother put it to music. The song became the black national anthem. Johnson also wrote “The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man” in 1912 (under another name but in 1927 it was released under his own name), and “The Creation” and “God’s Trombones: Seven Negro Sermons in Verse,” in the 1920s.
An educator, Waring painted portraits, still lifes, landscapes and illustrations. She was born in Connecticut in 1887 and her parents encouraged her artistic talent (her mother was an amateur artist). She attended the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and later traveled to Paris on a scholarship, where she studied at the Louvre. She taught at the Cheyney Training School for Teachers (now Cheyney University, just outside Philadelphia) for 30 years, forming its music and art departments. She did illustrations for the NAACP’s Crisis magazine, which was edited by DuBois.
The Johnson painting auction was a bit of a mystery. The image was similar to the Smithsonian’s – “a closely related version … with mostly minor compositional differences, but clearly the same painterly execution,” as the auction-house art specialist pointed out in a description accompanying the painting.
Some differences that were noted:
- The background landscape and figures are broader in the Smithsonian painting.
- The ledge separating Johnson’s figure from the background is missing in the Smithsonian’s.
- The narrow red curtain to Johnson’s right is missing from the Smithsonian’s. The curtain is reminiscent of one in a 1932 black and white photograph of Johnson by Carl Van Vechten, and the art specialist wondered if that was her nod to the famed photographer.
- The chair in the auction painting is plain compared to the one in the Smithsonian’s.
- The play of light on Johnson’s suit and the mountains in the background are different in both.
Then the question is: Which painting came first? There is no date on the auction painting, and the Smithsonian’s is from 1943.
“While it would not have been unusual for an artist to have created more than one finished version for a commission of this magnitude, it is not clear whether either Waring or Reyneau did so other than for the Johnson portrait,” according to the auction description.
The auction house had set the starting bid at $5,000, but the first bid came in at $3,500. The bidding ended at $5,500. It was not enough to buy the painting, which had a reserve of $10,000.
