"During his visit to Highlands, North Carolina, Tanner witnessed the conditions poverty-stricken African Americans were in and felt compelled to portray their lives. What makes Tanner’s work unique was his ability to portray these figures with dignity, value, and still having a rich culture, in spite of their various hardships. In the late 19th century, African Americans would have rarely been portrayed in mainstream art and, if so, were quite often victims of stereotypical and negative depictions. At a time where very few African American artists were getting formal recognition or training within the arts, Henry O. Tanner stood out as an artist who used his privilege to showcase and amplify these overlooked voices and stories."
-Kenlontae Turner, Curator of Collections - June 21, 2021 - Hampton University Museum
...........

-A Missing Question Mark: The Unknown Henry Ossawa Tanner - by Will South / 19th Century Art Worldwide
A Journal of 19th Century Visual Culture - Volume 8, Issue 2 Autumn 2009

Excerpt:
"In the latter half of 1893, when Tanner was working first on his illustration for "Uncle Tim's Compromise" and then on The Banjo Lesson, he wrote (using the third person): "To his mind many of the artists who have represented Negro life have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior."[38]
This statement gives us some idea of what Tanner might have said when he spoke at the Congress on Africa at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. In these few words, Tanner recognizes the preponderance of stereotypical imagery in American art, a catalogue of caricature that was but one manifestation of the monolithic American racist mind set.[39]"

[38] Statement in Tanner's hand in the files of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, Philadelphia. Quoted in Mosby and Sewell, Tanner, 116.

[39] See also E. P. Noble, "The Chicago Conference on Africa," Our Day 12, no. 70 (October 1893), 299 (printed incorrectly as 1983 in Sewell and Mosby, Tanner, 293n33), for evidence of Tanner's optimistic view of the future of African American art: "Professor Tanner . . . spoke of Negro painters and sculptors, and claimed that actual achievement proves Negroes to possess ability and talent for successful competition with white artists."

.................

Henry Ossawa Tanner, The Banjo Lesson
by Farisa Khalid / smarthistorydotorg
Excerpt

Henry Ossawa Tanner was the United States’ first African American celebrity artist. His training at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (under the guidance of Thomas Eakins) and at the Académie Julian in Paris (with Jean-Léon Gérôme) put him in the unique position of having experienced two vastly different approaches to painting— American Realism and French academic painting.

He was also one of the few artists to have had such training at a time when there were many barriers to education for African Americans. Though Tanner lived most of his life in France and became well known for his lush biblical paintings, The Banjo Lesson is his most famous work and the painting that has become emblematic with his oeuvre.

Henry Tanner painted The Banjo Lesson in 1893 after a series of sketches he made while visiting the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina four years before. Tanner had been studying and working in Paris until he developed a bout of typhoid fever and was advised to return to the United States to recover his health and dwindling finances. While taking up a teaching post at Clark University in Atlanta, Tanner’s doctor told him to take in some mountain air. His trip to North Carolina opened his eyes to the poverty of African Americans living in Appalachia.

The legacy of slavery
The United States had abolished slavery only twenty-four years before, in 1865, and the physical and psychological wounds of that brutal institution would continue to be a palpable presence in African American communities—especially so in the South. Though Tanner was born in Pittsburgh within the tight-knit world of highly-educated members of America’s burgeoning African American intelligentsia, Tanner’s mother Sarah had been born a slave and had escaped north to Pennsylvania through the Underground Railroad. His middle name, Ossawa, was chosen by his father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a Methodist minister and abolitionist, after Osawatomie, Kansas—the site of the abolitionist John Brown’s bloody confrontation with pro-slavery partisans on August 30, 1856.

Throughout his education and advancement in the art world in both the United States and Europe, the legacy of slavery haunted Tanner as he tried to establish a niche for himself as painter to be regarded on his own terms.

The Banjo Lesson grew out of a set of photographs and illustrations that Tanner made for the periodical Harper’s Young People in 1893. The illustration is of an elderly man teaching a young boy how to play the banjo, accompanied a short story by Ruth McEnery Stuart called “Uncle Tim’s Compromise on Christmas,” in which the titular character imparts his most prized possession, a banjo, to his grandson on Christmas morning.

Tanner had spent years refining a style of his own that combined elements of American Realism and the European Old Master tradition.

A radically different image
This theme of spiritual solace that Tanner encountered in the paintings of French Realists like Millet resonated with his own upbringing as the son of a Methodist minister. He hoped to find a way of highlighting the dignity and grace of poor African Americans in the manner that he had seen in France—an approach that would be radically different from stereotypical images of the overly servile “Uncle Tom” figure (named after the main character in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s iconic 1852 novel) that was familiar to Americans in countless advertisements (like this one, for Ayer’s Cathartic Pills [The Country Doctor], c. 1883) and popular magazines.

In The Banjo Lesson, Tanner’s desire to show us his vision of the resilience, spiritual grace, and creative and intellectual promise of post-Civil War African Americans is fully realized. The scene is staged within the small confines of a log cabin with the cool glow of a hearth fire casting the scene’s only light source from right corner, enveloping the man and the boy in a rectangular pool of light across the floor. The boy holds the banjo in both hands, his downward gaze a reflection of his focused concentration on his grandfather’s instructions. The older man holds the banjo up gently with his left hand so that the boy is not encumbered by its weight, yet the staging shows us that the man wants the boy to come into the realization of the music and its rewards through his own intuition and hard work.

Banjos, minstrel shows, and stereotypes of African Americans
Certainly Tanner would have seen a great deal of his own life played out in this tender scene. As the educated son of a former slave and a minister and abolitionist, Tanner was always striving to live up to his potential as an artist in the post-Civil War, post-Reconstruction era America. It is also important that the instrument that leads the boy towards enlightenment is the banjo, an instrument highly significant to African American slave culture and the music of the American South. The banjo evolved from the gourd instruments of Africa and the West Indies and became integral to the music of enslaved people throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.

By Tanner’s time, it was a mainstay of minstrel shows, popular variety entertainment that featured white actors in blackface performing songs and skits. In minstrel shows, it was the custom to portray African Americans as boisterous, jaunty, buffoonish, and dim-witted. This portrayal fed into the preconceived notions of white racial superiority—that African Americans, even if they were no longer slaves, would still be infantile and incapable of self-determined action or remarkable achievements. The entire visual and popular culture of Uncle Tom imagery and minstrel shows were part of the pernicious psychological chains of slavery that persisted in America throughout much of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The shows also depicted African Americans as having an innate musicality, which acknowledged their talent but undermined their intelligence.

For Tanner, painting this image of generational torch-passing, was a way of debunking the entrenched derogatory stereotypes of African Americans propagated by minstrel shows. In Tanner’s painting we see the grandfather and the boy as intelligent, noble, graceful people engaged in an intimate act of sharing creative knowledge. Their lesson becomes emblematic of the larger African American journey of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, from Emancipation, Reconstruction, the terrors and injustices of the Jim Crow laws, the exodus of the Great Migration, and the foment and dynamism of the Harlem Renaissance.

An American artist
After painting The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, Tanner moved back to Paris where he would remain for most of his life. Tanner felt that France was less encumbered with the baggage of racial prejudice towards people of color than the United States. “In America, I’m Henry Tanner, Negro artist, but in France, I’m ‘Monsieur Tanner, l’artiste américaine.‘”[1]

His desire to be recognized by the quality of his talent would inspire him to paint prolifically throughout his life, traveling through the Middle East and North Africa in search of authentic imagery for biblical paintings that would become the hallmark of his later career. When World War I was declared in Europe, Tanner enlisted in the Red Cross, serving as a medical volunteer as well as making numerous sketches and various paintings of the soldiers in France and Belgium. In 1923, he was awarded the Legion of Honour by the French government for his service during the war.

But it is The Banjo Lesson that has become the iconic painting of his entire career. Its economy of scale, its emotional delicacy, its nuanced orchestration of light and shadow and symbolism situates it in a resonant space in American art history. Both The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor were remarkable achievements for Tanner—works that according to the art historian Judith Wilson, “invest their ordinary, underprivileged, Black subjects with a degree of dignity and self-possession that seems extraordinary for the times in which they were painted.”[2] It is a testament to Tanner’s vision as an artist, and his personal convictions as an African American, amid the possibilities offered by twentieth century, that these two paintings continue to speak so profoundly to us now.
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Left image: Henry Ossawa Tanner, "The Banjo Lesson", 1893, oil on canvas, 124.5 × 90.2 cm. Collection of Hampton University Museum, Hampton, VA.

Right image: 1907 Photograph portrait of Henry Ossawa Tanner by Frederick Gutekunst (1831–1917)
Identification on verso (handwritten): To be returned; H. O. Tanner; 70 bis rue Notre Dame des Champs; Paris; 1907
Source: Henry Ossawa Tanner papers 1860s-1978Collection of The Archives of American Art - Smithsonian
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Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) was an American artist who spent much of his career in France. He became the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim.[1] Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian and gained acclaim in French artistic circles. In 1923, the French government elected Tanner chevalier of the Legion of Honor.[2][3]

Early life
Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.[4] His father Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835–1923) became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent black denomination in the United States. He was educated at Avery College and Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, and developed a literary career.[5] In addition, he was a political activist, supporting abolition of slavery. Henry Tanner's mother Sarah Elizabeth Tanner may have been born into slavery in Virginia.[6][7]

Two different stories have emerged concerning her living in freedom; in one, her father drives the family from Winchester, Virginia to "the free state of Pennsylvania" in an ox cart.[6] In the other, she escapes as a refugee to the North via the Underground Railroad.[7] There she met and married Benjamin Tucker Tanner.[6]

Tanner was the first of nine[4] children; and two of his brothers, Benjamin and Horace, died in infancy.[8] One of his sisters, Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson, was the first woman to be certified to practice medicine in Alabama.[9] His parents gave him a middle name that commemorated the struggle at Osawatomie between pro- and anti-slavery partisans.[10] The family moved from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia when Tanner was a teenager.[11] There his father became a friend of Frederick Douglass, sometimes supporting him, sometimes criticizing.[12]

Robert Douglass, Jr., a successful black artist in Philadelphia, was an early neighbor of the Tanner family, and Tanner wrote that he "used to pass and always stopped to look at his pictures in the window."[13] When Tanner was about 13 years old, he saw a landscape painter working in Fairmount Park, where he was walking with his father. He decided that he wanted to be a painter.[8]

Education
Although many white artists refused to accept an African-American apprentice, in 1879 Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, becoming the only black student.[12] His decision to attend the school came at a time when art academies increasingly focused on study from live models rather than plaster casts.
Thomas Eakins, a professor at the Pennsylvania Academy, was one of the first American artists to promote new approaches to artistic education including increased study from live models, discussion of anatomy in classes of both male and female students, and dissections of cadavers to teach anatomy. Eakins's progressive approach to art education had a profound effect on Tanner. The young artist was one of Eakins' favorite students; two decades after Tanner left the Academy, Eakins painted his portrait.[14]

At the Academy, Tanner befriended artists with whom he kept in contact throughout the rest of his life, most notably Robert Henri, one of the founders of the Ashcan School. During a relatively short time at the Academy, Tanner developed a thorough knowledge of anatomy and the skill to express his understanding of the weight and structure of the human figure on the canvas.[15]

Tanner's artistic studies were disrupted by illness, which was reported in November 1881 and said to have persisted into the following summer, when Tanner spent time recovering in the Adirondack Mountains.[16]

Tanner's teachers included Thomas Eakins (American realism, photography), Thomas Hovenden (American realism), Benjamin Constant (orientalist paintings and portraits, French academic) and Jean-Paul Laurens (history painting, French academic).[17][18]

Painting Style
Tanner painted landscapes, religious subjects, and scenes of daily life in a realistic style that echoed that of Eakins.[19][20] While works like The Banjo Lesson depicted everyday scenes of African American life, Tanner later painted religious subjects.[21] It is likely that Tanner's father, a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was a formative influence for him.[15]

Tanner was not limited to one specific approach to painting and drawing. His works reflect at times meticulous attention to detail and loose, expressive brushstrokes in others. Often both methods are employed simultaneously. Tanner was also interested in the effects that color could have in a painting.[22] Warmer compositions such as The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896) and The Annunciation (1898) express the intensity and fire of religious moments, and the elation of transcendence between the divine and humanity. Other paintings emphasize cool hues, which became dominant in his work after the mid-1890s. A palette of indigo and turquoise—referred to as the "Tanner blues"—characterizes works such as The Three Marys (1910), Gateway (1912) and The Arch (1919).[23] Works such as The Good Shepherd (1903) and Return of the Holy Women (1904) evoke a feeling of somber religiosity and introspection.

Tanner often experimented with light in his works, which at times adds symbolic meaning. In The Annunciation (1898), for example, the archangel Gabriel is represented as a column of light that forms, together with the shelf in the upper left corner, a cross.[24]

Issues of racism
Although Tanner gained confidence as an artist and began to sell his work, he faced racism working as a professional artist in Philadelphia.[25] In his autobiography, The Story of an Artist's Life, Tanner described the burden of racism:

I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself.[26]

In the hope of earning enough money to travel to Europe, Tanner operated a photography studio in Atlanta during the late 1880s. The venture was unsuccessful. During this period Tanner met Bishop Joseph Crane Hartzell, a trustee of Clark College (now Clark Atlanta University). Hartzell and his wife befriended Tanner, became his patrons, and recommended him for a teaching job at the college.[27] Tanner taught drawing at Clark College for a short period.[21]

1891
Tanner set out for Rome by way of Liverpool and Paris on the ship City of Chester on 4 January 1891.[28] He found Paris to his liking and discovered the Académie Julian, where he began his studies in France.[29] He also joined the American Art Students Club. Paris was a welcome escape for Tanner; within French art circles, race mattered little. Tanner discovered the Paris Salon and set a goal to get his artwork accepted.[29]

The Banjo Lesson
On a return visit to the United States in 1893, Tanner presented "The American Negro in Art", an essay, at the World's Congress on Africa in Chicago,[4] and painted The Banjo Lesson, one of his most recognized works that began as a series of sketches of Black people living in Appalachia.[30] The painting shows an elderly black man teaching a boy, assumed to be his grandson, how to play the banjo.[23][31] The image of a black man playing the banjo appears throughout American art of the late 19th century.[32][31]

Life in Paris
Except for occasional brief returns home, Tanner spent the rest of his life in Paris. He acclimated quickly to Parisian life, and became friends with Atherton Curtis.[33][34] He was part of a community of artists in Mount Kisco, New York for six months in 1902, at the behest of Curtis, and returned the following winter.[35]

In Paris, Tanner continued his studies under renowned artists such as Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens.[26] With their guidance, he began to establish a reputation in France. He settled at the Étaples art colony in Normandy. There he was introduced to many artists whose works would affect his approach to art. At the Louvre, he encountered and studied the works of Gustave Courbet, Jean-Baptiste Chardin and Louis Le Nain.[31] These artists had painted scenes of ordinary people in their environment, and the influence in Tanner's work is noticeable. That of Courbet's The Stone Breakers (1850; destroyed) can be seen in the similarities in Tanner's The Young Sabot Maker (1895). Both paintings explore the themes of apprenticeship and manual labor.[31]

Earlier, Tanner had painted marine scenes of man's struggle with the sea, but by 1895 he was creating mostly religious works. His shift to painting biblical scenes occurred as he was undergoing a spiritual struggle. In a letter he wrote to his parents on Christmas 1896, he stated, "I have made up my mind to serve Him [God] more faithfully."[36] A transitional work from this period is the recently rediscovered painting of a fishing boat tossed on the waves, which is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.[37]

Tanner's painting Daniel in the Lions' Den was accepted into the 1896 Salon.[15] Later that year he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) that was purchased by the French government after winning the third-place medal at the 1897 Salon.[38] Upon seeing The Resurrection of Lazarus,[39] Rodman Wanamaker, an art critic and a "major patron of contemporary religious art,"[40] offered to pay all the expenses for Tanner to visit the Middle East.[15] Wanamaker felt that any serious painter of biblical scenes needed to see the environment firsthand and that a painter of Tanner's caliber was well worth the investment. Tanner accepted Wanamaker's offer.[40] For four months in 1897 and, again, for six months in 1898-1899, he trekked a popular tourist route through Palestine and North Africa, pitching his tent in the arid region.[40]

Tanner did not exhibit at the Salon in 1907, due to eye strain, but in 1908 entered The Wise and Foolish Virgins which he worked on in 1906, 1907 and finished in 1908. Newspapers don't record a Salon entry for 1909; but he focused his 1908 energy on a one-man exhibition of his artwork in New York, and the 1909 papers continued to talk about that event. Tanner may have avoided displaying at the Salon 1910, 1911, 1912, and 1913.[41]

In 1914, Tanner's mother died,[42] World War I started, and he returned to the Paris Salon after "several years of absence," bringing his 1912 painting Christ in the House of Lazarus and Mary.[43][42] He had remarked in 1910 "that he would not exhibit in the salon again as they had stuck his picture into a corner which everyone knows is almost an insult."[41] French artists were upset over a U.S. tariff on their paintings, and said to be taking revenge in the Salon.[41]

Later years
During World War I, Tanner worked for the Red Cross Public Information Department, during which time he also painted images from the front lines of the war.[44] His works featuring African-American troops were rare during the war. In 1923 the French state made him a knight of the Legion of Honour for his work as an artist.

Tanner met with fellow African-American artist Palmer Hayden in Paris circa 1927. They discussed artistic technique and he gave Hayden advice on interacting with French society.[45] He was also an inspiration to other artists studying in France, including Hale Woodruff, Romare Bearden, and other artists associated with Black Abstractionism.[17]

Several of Tanner's paintings were purchased by Atlanta art collector J. J. Haverty, who founded Haverty Furniture Co. and was instrumental in establishing the High Museum of Art. Tanner's Étaples Fisher Folk is among several paintings from the Haverty collection now in the High Museum's permanent collection.

Tanner died peacefully at his home in Paris, France, on May 25, 1937.[44] He is buried at Sceaux Cemetery in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine, a suburb of Paris.

Marriage and Family
In 1899 he married Jessie Olsson, a Swedish-American opera singer.[46] A contemporary, Virginia Walker Course, described their relationship as one of equal talents, but racist attitudes insisted the relationship was unequal:

Fan, did you ever hear of a miss [sic] Olsson of Portland? She has a beautiful voice I believe and came to Paris to cultivate it and she has married a darkey artist ... He is an awefully [sic] talented man but he is black. ... She seems like a well educated girl and really very nice but it makes me sick to see a cultivated woman marry a man like that. I don't know his work but he is very talented they say.[47]

Jessie Tanner died in 1925, twelve years before her husband, and he grieved her deeply through the 1920s. He sold the family home in Les Charmes where they had been so happy together. They are buried next to each other in Sceaux, Hauts-de-Seine.[48]

They had a son, Jesse, who survived Tanner at his death.[21]

Friends and colleagues
Tanner's friends and colleagues included Hermon MacNeil (sculptor), Hermann Dudley Murphy (landscapes), Paul Gauguin (synthetism), Myron G. Barlow (genre painting), Charles Hovey Pepper (Japanese style woodblocks). Charles Filiger (symbolist), Armand Séguin (Post-Impressionism), Jan Verkade (Post-Impressionism, Christian symbolist), Paul Sérusier (abstract art), and Gustave Loiseau (Post-Impressionism).[17][49][50]

Legacy
Tanner's work was influential during his career; he has been called "the greatest African American painter to date."[52] The early paintings of William Edouard Scott, who studied with Tanner in France, show the influence of Tanner's technique.[31] In addition, some of Norman Rockwell's illustrations deal with the same themes and compositions that Tanner pursued. Rockwell's proposed cover of the Literary Digest in 1922, for example, shows an older black man playing the banjo for his grandson. The light sources are nearly identical to those in Tanner's Banjo Lesson. A fireplace illuminates the right side of the picture, while natural light enters from the left. Both use similar objects as well such as the clothing, chair, crumpled hat on the floor.[31] Some other major artists Tanner mentored include William A. Harper and Hale Woodruff.[8]

Tanner's Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (c. 1885; oil on canvas) hangs in the Green Room at the White House; it is the first painting by an African-American artist to have been purchased for the permanent collection of the White House. The painting is a landscape with a "view across the cool gray of a shadowed beach to dunes made pink by the late afternoon sunlight. A low haze over the water partially hides the sun." It was bought for $100,000 by the White House Endowment Fund during the Bill Clinton administration from Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter, grandniece of the artist.[53]

His correspondence with Curtis between 1904 and 1937 is held at the Smithsonian Institution.[54]

Tanner's work was included in the 2015 exhibition We Speak: Black Artists in Philadelphia, 1920s-1970s at the Woodmere Art Museum.[55]

Awards
Photo of Tanner's lost painting, Daniel in the Lion's Den, 1896.
1895, Atlanta, Cotton States and International Exposition: bronze medal for The Bagpipe Lesson.[56]
1896, Salon: honorable mention[57] for Daniel in the Lions' Den[58]
1897, Salon: third class medal[57] for Raising of Lazarus[59]
1899, Philadelphia Academy of Fine Art: Walter Lippincott prize[57] for Christ and Nicodemus on a Rooftop[59]
1900, Paris Exposition: silver medal[57][60] for Daniel in the Lions' Den[58]
1901, Buffalo Exposition: silver medal[57][60] for Daniel in the Lions' Den[58]
1904, St. Louis Exposition: silver medal[57][60] for Daniel in the Lions' Den[58]
1906, Salon: second class medal for The Disciples at Emmaus[58]
1906, Art Institute of Chicago, Norman Wait Harris silver medal for The Two Disciples at the Tomb[57][61][59]
1915, Panama–Pacific International Exposition, San Francisco: gold medal[57][60] for Christ at the Home of Lazarus[58] (This link is to the study, not the final painting).
1922, France: Knighthood of the Legion of Honor[57] for his efforts in World War I, part of the Red Cross[62]
1927, New York, National Arts Club: bronze medal for Flight into Egypt (At the Gates)[58]
1930, New York City, Grand Central Art Gallery: Walter L. Clark prize for Etaples Fisher Folk[59][58]
Exhibitions

1973 U.S. commemorative stamp honoring Tanner.
1972: The Art of Henry Ossawa Tanner. Glen Falls, New York: The Hyde Collection.
1972: 19th Century American Landscape. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art.
1976: Two Centuries of Black American Art. Los Angeles County Museum of Art.
1989: Black Art Ancestral Legacy: The African Impulse in African-American Art. Dallas Museum of Art.
1993: Revisiting the White City: American Art at the 1893 World's Fair[32]
2010: Henry Ossawa Tanner and His Contemporaries,[63] Des Moines Art Center (December–February 2011).
2012: Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit,[64] Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia (January–April), then to Cincinnati Art Museum[65] (May–September) and to Houston Museum of Fine Arts (October–January 2013)

Source: Wikipedia