Tanner, Henry Ossawa

Impact on the world

Became the first African American painter to achieve international acclaim after relocating to Paris in 1891, where his 1896 painting 'Daniel in the Lions' Den' earned a Salon honorable mention and his 1897 'The Resurrection of Lazarus' won a Salon medal and was purchased by the French government; in 1923 he became a chevalier of the French Legion of Honor, and in 1927 the first African American granted full membership in New York's National Academy of Design.

Life & background

Born in Pittsburgh to a bishop father and a mother who had escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad as a child, Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1880 as its only African American student, studying under realist painter Thomas Eakins. Concluding after a brief 1893 return to Philadelphia that he could not overcome American racial prejudice as an artist, he settled permanently in Paris, where his religious paintings, deeply informed by his upbringing as a minister's son and his 1897-98 travels through Palestine and North Africa, earned him sustained acclaim at the Paris Salon throughout the 1890s and 1900s. His 1893 painting 'The Banjo Lesson,' depicting an elderly Black man teaching a child to play, remains one of his best-known and most frequently reproduced works for its tender, dignified portrayal of intergenerational Black family life. He served with the American Red Cross in France during World War I, and his influence extended to later artists including William Edward Scott, who studied directly under him in France.

Sources

1. Encyclopædia Britannica; Smithsonian American Art Museum; Illustration History