The painting of Mary Ann Tritt Cassell by a D.C. artist is likely the first known portrait commissioned by an American born into slavery.
A portrait believed to be of Mary Ann Tritt Cassell, c. 1839, is on extended loan to the Baltimore Museum of Art, where it goes on display this week. The artist is believed to be James Alexander Simpson. The painting was an heirloom, handed down through generations but unknown to the world at large. The identity of its subject was uncertain.
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.
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. 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, 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.
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