Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937), American painter, known for his paintings of everyday African American life and for his scenes from the Bible. His best-known work, The Banjo Lesson (1893, Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia), illustrates his mastery of genre painting. In it, a gray-haired man sits in the center of a plain room with few furnishings and helps a young boy play the banjo.

Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Sarah Miller Tanner and Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a minister and later a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Many of the Bible stories Tanner heard as a youth were later portrayed in his paintings. At the age of 13 Tanner watched an artist at work and decided to take up painting. In 1880 he entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, becoming the second black student to attend America’s oldest art school. At the Academy he studied with American realist painter Thomas Eakins.

After working as a photographer in Philadelphia and as a private art instructor in Atlanta, Georgia, Tanner traveled to Europe in 1891. He spent a short time in London before settling in Paris, where he studied painting at the Académie Julien. In the summer of 1893 Tanner returned to America to recuperate from typhoid fever, but he lived permanently in France after 1894. He submitted Daniel in the Lions’ Den (1895, location unknown) to the Paris Salon Exhibition of 1896 and received honorable mention, an honor no other American received that year.

His religious works brought Tanner recognition in both France and America. In one of these works, The Annunciation (1898, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Pennsylvania), the angel Gabriel, represented as a shaft of light, appears before the Virgin Mary. Gabriel’s announcement that Mary is to be the mother of Jesus Christ is greeted by her with some anxiety. In Angels Appearing Before the Shepherds (1910, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.), angels dominate the composition, hovering in the sky above a pastoral landscape with shepherds.

Tanner was elected a chevalier of the Legion of Honor by the French government in 1923, and in 1927 he was elected a full member of the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1996 Tanner’s Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (1885?) was acquired for the art collection of the White House in Washington, D.C.; it was the first work by an African American painter to be chosen for this collection.