An art mystery is solved, and a historic portrait goes on display

An art mystery is solved, and a historic portrait goes on display

The painting was an heirloom, handed down through generations but unknown to the world at large. The identity of its subject was uncertain. The owner thought it was an ancestor, probably painted by Georgetown artist James Alexander Simpson in the first half of the 19th century, but she wasn’t certain.

Now, the mystery of the portrait has been solved, and it’s scheduled to go on exhibit at the Baltimore Museum of Art this week.

The woman sitting for the portrait was Mary Ann Tritt Cassell, a woman of mixed race. Formal portraits of African Americans in the period of slavery are rare, but this is one of a kind: It’s probably the first known portrait commissioned by an American born into slavery.

Mary Ann’s mother, Henrietta Steptoe, was born in 1779 on the Stratford Hall plantation in Westmoreland County, Va., where she was enslaved by Philip Lee. Upon his death, she passed to Lee’s young daughter, Flora. When Flora’s widowed mother married Philip Fendall, Steptoe followed her to the Lee-Fendall House in Alexandria. And when Flora came of age and married her cousin Ludwell Lee, Steptoe became his property. He was the son of Richard Henry Lee, a signer of the Declaration of Independence and a second cousin of Henry “Light-Horse Harry” Lee, father of Robert E. Lee.

In 1803, Ludwell moved to his new home of Belmont in Loudoun County, Va., and freed Steptoe. She moved to Georgetown, then its own municipality within the District of Columbia.

There, Steptoe joined a small free Black community. She worked as a midwife and nurse. Her brother-in-law belonged to the Mutual Relief Society, formed by Black businessmen and skilled craftsmen to help one another. Another member of the community, Yarrow Mamout, had come to America on a slave ship and had his portrait painted in 1822 by Simpson, who would later paint Mary Ann. But Yarrow did not commission his portrait, and Simpson kept it.

Mary Ann was born in 1807 and baptized at Georgetown’s Holy Trinity Catholic Church. Her baptismal certificate lists neither a last name nor a father. At the time, there were two private schools for African American girls in the neighborhood, and records suggest she went to the one run by a young Black woman named Mary Becraft. An 1870 history of Black schools in D.C. described its student body as “girls from the best colored families of Georgetown, Washington, Alexandria, and surrounding country.”

Karin J. Bohleke, an expert in historical fashion at Shippensburg University in Pennsylvania, dated Mary Ann’s portrait to the early 1840s, based on her hairstyle and clothing. She also noted that parents often commissioned portraits of their daughters when they got married, so the portrait may have been painted around Nov. 4, 1839, when Mary Ann married William Cassell.

But while it was common for White families to commission wedding portraits, this is a portrait of an African American woman in the time of slavery. If Henrietta paid for it, as seems probable because it remained in the family, experts at the Baltimore museum say it may be the earliest portrait in the United States commissioned by a formerly enslaved person.

African colonization

William Cassell was from Baltimore and active in the colonization movement, which promoted colonies in Africa where free Black people could go to escape racism in the United States. Cassell and a first wife had done so in 1833, but he returned home after she died. He yearned to go back.

His obituary in the Maryland Colonization Journal would note, “[H]aving once tasted freedom in Africa, [he] found it difficult to remain in a country where he could not be recognized as a man — although as much respected by all classes, with whom he came in contact, as any one of his color could be.”

Many, however, saw colonization as racist. Georgetown’s Mutual Relief Society took a middle position and sent a petition to Congress asking that a colony be set up along the Missouri River, where it would enjoy government protection closer to home.

The American Colonization Society was formed back in 1817. Its leaders were White. Its first colony was Monrovia, now in Liberia. The Maryland Colonization Society, a state chapter, was founded in the same year.

Maryland had the largest number of free Blacks in the country, and its racist legislature hoped to get rid of them. It funded the state chapter, which later started its own colony at Cape Palmas, 200 miles south of Monrovia. That is where Cassell and his first wife lived.

After Cassell returned to Baltimore, he studied law. In 1848, he returned to Cape Palmas, leaving Mary Ann behind, and was appointed chief justice of the colony.

In 1850, Cassell came home, and he and Mary Ann sailed to Africa together. The colony resembled small towns in America, and food could be bought from nearby villages. But jobs and staples such as flour and salted meat were scarce.

Cassell died of disease in 1856. Meanwhile, hostilities had broken out between an Indigenous village and the Americans, with killings on both sides until a military force from Monrovia sailed down to restore peace in early 1857. Realizing its weakness, the Maryland colony merged with Liberia.

Mary Ann’s legacy

Mary Ann, now a widow, soldiered on. A visitor described her as a person “whom I at once recognized as an American lady, and who served up her dinner in true American style.”

Though raised Catholic, she had become Episcopalian, and she ran an orphanage for Episcopal missionaries she had befriended. Later, she also ran the Episcopal hospital.

Mary Ann died on Feb. 15, 1871. The Maryland society’s newsletter cited her death announcement in a Liberian newspaper, which it quoted as calling her “a real lady and a great friend of the Missionaries, for whom her house was always open, and to whom her society was always welcome.” The newsletter concluded, “Her closing days were peaceful, brightened as they were by a hope of the glorious immortality.”

Now, as her portrait goes on display, she has found that immortality.

Mary Ann’s portrait is among friends at the Baltimore Museum of Art. On the museum’s property is a spring house designed by Architect of the Capitol Benjamin Latrobe for Robert Goodloe Harper, the founding president of the Maryland Colonization Society. The town of Harper, where Mary Ann lived at Cape Palmas, was named for him. He was succeeded as president by Latrobe’s son John. Cassell knew John, and Mary Ann surely met him.

Although the portrait is unsigned, the museum attributes it to Simpson based on the age of the paint and the work’s look, feel and brushstrokes, as well as the fact that Simpson was the only known commercial painter in Georgetown at the time.

And then there is the matter of the portrait’s subject.

The painting’s owner, who asked not to be identified, contacted me because I had given a talk on Simpson. Researchers Carlton Fletcher and Jack Fallin, who had already studied Mary Ann’s family, alerted me to her sister’s 1877 last will and testament. When I read the document, I found that it included a bequest of “my sister’s picture.”

What sets the painting apart isn’t artistic merit — Simpson was a competent painter, not a great one — but that it appears to represent the earliest instance of a formerly enslaved person having the ambition and means to commission and acquire a luxury like a portrait of her daughter. The faces and stories of so many of the enslaved and their children have been lost. Mary Ann’s were among them — but now, at last, they are found.

James Johnston is a Washington writer and author of the book “From Slave Ship to Harvard: Yarrow Mamout and the History of an African American Family.”