Sale 2487 - African-American Fine Art, October 4, 2018

known screenprint images Johnson made in a short period of the early 1940s, On a John Brown Flight is the only image of an American historical figure, and is the largest of any of his prints. Johnson also painted a gouache and pencil version of this subject, and a heroic image of the Abolitionist leader in the 1945 oil John Brown Legend ; both are in the collection of the Smithsonian American Art Museum. This is the only the second impression of this print to come to auction - an unsigned impression was sold at Swann Galleries on February 13, 2014. We have located only four impressions of On a John Brown Flight in the following public collections: the Library of Congress, the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and the Smithsonian Institution. These were experimental and painterly prints, using both screens and pochoir (hand-colored stencils) - each impression has a slightly different registration. [50,000/75,000]