Rev. Gideon Johnston (1657-1713), a pioneering (if short-lived) minister of the Anglican church in Charleston, was a son of Rev. James Johnston (c. 1620-1681). Both father and son were ministers of the Established (Anglican) Church in the diocese of Tuam in Ireland, and served mainly in the Mayo-Roscommon area. Gideon had the "living" of Castlemore Union or group of churches. Castlemore itself was the ancestral home of the Plunket family, but the vicarage, in the gift of Viscount Dillon, was most probably in the nearby village of Ballaghadereen. 

 

In 1705 he married Henrietta Beaulieu Dering (c. 1674-1729), a self-trained artist whose formative years were spent in Ireland. She was born to Cesar (a Heugeneot minister) and Suzanne du Pre Beaulieu near Rennes in France, but left with them for England in 1687 following the sect's persecution. 

 

In 1694 she married Robert Dering (1669-1703) of Surrenden Dering, near Pluckley in Kent. He was the fifth son of Sir Edward Dering (1625-1684), a member of a scholarly and military family who established a company of infantry which saw service in Ireland in 1689 and from 1697 to 1700. Robert's grandfather had been a Commissioner for the 1662 Irish Act of Settlement, and a member of parliament for Lisburn.

 

Robert and Henrietta appear to have lived mainly in Ireland from about 1697 in connection with his family's military and property interests there, but by the early years of the 18th. century Robert had died and Henrietta (who may have been estranged from him in later years) was already accomplished in painting in pastels, a practice then in its infancy. 

 

The contemporary art scene in England and Ireland was still dominated by Continental subjects, styles and processes, as promoted by foreign-born establishment figures such as the Dutch Sir Antony Van Dyck and Sir Geoffrey Kneller, the German-born court painter, and by gifted amateurs like Sir Edward Luttrell. Luttrell was a pioneer of mezzzotinting, in which pastels were often used for preliminary or intermediate workings. In Dublin, a male-dominated guild controlled art training and entry to professional ranks. 

 

Henrietta's influences are therefore more likely to have come from her own technical initiative and from artists, mentors and patrons in the Dering circle in both Englan and Ireland during the last decade of the 17th. century and the first years of the 18th. Among her early Irish portraits are a group of the Percival family of Belvedere, near Mullingar in Co. Westmeath. 

 

Her outreach to the provinces may have been part of a pattern that in 1705 resulted in her marriage to the 48-year-old Gideon, and their settling as a family in Ballaghadereen. Here Henrietta passed three uneventful years, acting as mother a daughter, Mary (1700-1747), who later made a prosperous career as a fashion adviser in the court of George II. A second daughter, Helena, had died at the age of four in April 1704, fifteen months after Henrietta lost her first husband; the loss was made poignant by the later discovery of a portrait painted by her mother - a wonderful story related by the collector who discovered the portrait: 

http://www.antiquesandfineart.com/articles/article.cfm?request=572).

 

In 1708, Gideon was appointed the first  Commmisary of the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel to Foreign Parts at St. Philip's Church in Charleston. Henrietta and her three offspring arrived alone in the city, Gideon having failed to rejoin the boat in a stop-over at the Madeira Islands. 

 

When he did arrive, life in the new posting was made more difficult by infighting among church wardens, parishioners and even ministers (the delay in Gideon's arrival had allowed a challenger to flourish). Gideon's voluminous correspondence shows the poverty, ill-health and disillusionment with which he had to contend, and famously notes that "were it not for the Assistance my wife gives me by drawing of Pictures ... I shou'd not have been able to live". Prospering Heugeneot immigrants and rising colonial land-owners craved the elegant shadings of Henrietta's delicate media, and her work on display at the Gibbes features members of the Bacot, Chastaigner, du Bose and Dugue families, as well as, remarkably, Colonel William Rhett. 

 

In 1710 Henrietta left for London to represent her husband on business with the church authorities there (Gideon was deep in debt and a trip abroad was a risk too far for his creditors). Almost three years later, she returned to Charleston, only to suffer the death of her husband by drowning in Charleston Harbor as he returned from a short journey accompanying visiting clergymen to their ship. 

 

For the remaining dozen years of her life, Henrietta worked from Charleston and (briefly) New York, often staying at the homes of her patrons. She died in early 1729 and is buried with her husband in Charleston.

 

As well as the Gibbes Museum in Charleston her surviving workbody of about 40 pieces is represented in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; Yale University Art Gallery; the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation; the New York State Museum; and in private collections in the United States and in Ireland.

 

In the mid 1970s, the Savannah art collector and dealer Jim Williams (of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil fame) recognised a significant number of  works by Henrietta on the walls of the Percival's Irish mansion (Belvedere, near Mullingar) and purchased them in the estate sale. They were later sold as part of his estate after his death in 1990.