Untitled

We don’t know who this impressive man is, but from the day a curator at Philadelphia’s Balch Institute for Ethnic Studies showed him to us, we’ve wanted to. The painter has been identified—he is Joseph Whiting Stock, from Massachusetts—and the newspaper is the abolitionist Liberator . Possibly the subject is Richard Johnson, the paper’s New Bedford agent in 1848; perhaps a reader can give a name to this man, who clearly meant to make a difference in his time.