Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)

Born of English, African, and American Indian ancestry, Tanner grew up in a home that served as a locus for black culture and intellectual achievement. His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a minister (later a Bishop) of the African Methodist Church. His mother, Sarah Miller, was a former slave who escaped to freedom on the underground railroad. In 1868, the family relocated from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia, and the young Tanner's interest in art was kindled by exposure to local artists and exhibitions such as the great Centennial exposition in Fairmont Park in July 1896. Tanner grew up in a home that served as a locus for black culture and intellectual achievement.

Tanner's early career was marked by racial hostilities that ultimately precipitated the artist's departure for France in 1891. Despite his father's encouragement to pursue the ministry, Tanner enrolled in the newly-established and highly progressive art school at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879. Not only was Tanner fortunate in having the Academy as his formative place of study but he also came in close contact with his teacher, Thomas Eakins. Under his rigorous tutelage, Tanner learned the elements of figure painting, a complete understanding of form and structure revealed in space by light. Moreover Eakins was then undergoing changes in his own art of the period; Tanner recalled the excitement he felt when he viewed Eakins' large painting titled The Crucifixion in 1881. This caused him to begin to work with religious subjects. As it turned out, Henry O. Tanner had entered his ministry, after all.

After seven more years of effort in Philadelphia in the attempt to establish a career as an artist and illustrator, Tanner moved to Atlanta and tried to set up a photographic portrait gallery. This proved to be a failure, and he accepted a brief teaching position at Clark University, a Methodist school for black students. Here he met supporters of his work who provided the funds that were needed to study in Europe. In 1891 Tanner left for Paris and enrolled at the Académie Julian where he quickly achieved front rank and developed a close relationship with his teachers, Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant and Jean Paul Laurens. He became active in the American Art Club, a gathering place complete with library, restaurant, athletic room, parlors, and a secluded garden. Here Tanner met many of his fellow artists who would become close friends, such as the sculptor Hermon Maceil and the painter Frederick Frieseke. Tanner spent the following summer in Pont Aven, where Gauguin had painted two years earlier and where there was a large art colony made up of many Americans. He was inspired by the simple Breton types that he found there to paint and thought again of his earlier classes with Eakins. 

Back in Paris, Tanner decided to return to Philadelphia to again try his hand as a self-sufficient artist, but within a years time had returned to Paris, convinced that he would never have a chance in America. In 1894 he had his first work accepted at the Paris Salon, which drew favorable notice in the American press. Then in 1895, his masterful rendition of Daniel in the Lion's Den was singled out by Gerome himself and hung "on the line " in the Salon, where it won an honorable mention. Tanner's reputation was launched as a painter of biblical subjects, in a style which emphasized deep, resonant color, dramatic light and shadow, and thick, expressive brushwork. From the beginning Tanner maintained that his works were paintings first, and subjects second. "I believe most sincerely in a religious sentiment in religious pictures but, so far, have never seen it in a canvas which did not possess also artistic qualities," he once wrote. His painting attracted the attention of Rodman Wanamaker of Philadelphia, who arranged for the artist's first trip to the Near East the following year. Upon his return he was informed that his next large religious picture, The Raising of Lazarus, was to be purchased by the French government for the Musee d'Art Moderne, a very great honor, and it became the hit of the Salon, as well. "There was group after group before this quietly beautiful picture," wrote  a critic for the Boston Herald. "I doubt if any award given to a comparatively unknown artist has ever met with more genuine and spontaneous acquiescence."

A trip to Palestine in 1897 changed forever Tanner's life, shifting the focus of his paintings toward a symbolist interpretation of Scripture.

In that year of his triumph, 1897, Henry Tanner met Jessie Macauley Olssen (d.1925), the daughter of a wealthy San Francisco merchant, and she became the model in the artist's next Salon picture, The Annunciation, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art. In 1899 they were married, and the young couple settled down in a small apartment overlooking the Luxembourg Gardens. Tanner continued to make inspirational trips to the Near East, where he was captivated by the light, color, and forms in the environment. The artist's mystical preoccupation with the imagination freed by form, color, and light was constant with the precepts of Symbolism, even though there was much of his own background in his work. "Mr. Tanner is not only a Biblical painter-- not only a Philadelphian-- but, as well, he has brought  to modern art a new spirit," one critic wrote in the period. Tanner's friends urged him to return to America, and in 1902 the artist and his young wife arrived in upstate New York, where one of his patrons hoped to establish an art colony. The following year the couple's only child, a son christened Jessie Ossawa Tanner, was born in New York City. But it soon became obvious that Tanner's race, along with his mixed marriage, would not allow him to lead a normal life in his native land. By June 1904 they were back in Paris, this time for good. Tanner and his family eventually settled in a spacious studio-apartment on the Rue Notre-Dame-des Champs. With continual support from their American patrons, they also purchased a summer home at Trepied, in the Pas de Calais, not far from Dieppe. The latter location became the center of an American art colony, and Tanner was looked upon as the leading biblical painter of the day, even by Parisian art circles. For the next ten years he would be at the height of his fame and produce some of his greatest works.

Not surprisingly, his style changed as a result of constant exposure to the art of the Impressionist and Post-Impressionist painters. His tonalities became lighter and more translucent, often blue and blue-green. He developed an oil glaze approach that made his work similar to that of Albert Pinkham Ryder, where built-up layers of paint indicated expressive levels of light and shadow. Meanwhile, his paintings began to win prizes and critical attention at home. A painting titled Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha was acquired by the Carnegie Institute, and Two Disciples at the Tomb was awarded the top prize at the Art Institute of Chicago and entered its permanent collection. Yet Tanner's race hampered his efforts to receive the recognition that he deserved. "For several years past the art world of Paris has shown steadily increasing interest in the work of Henry O. Tanner, a young American painter who has done much toward strengthening that high position in contemporary art which was won for us by Sargent and Whistler," a critic reported in 1908. "In America public recognition of Tanner's genius has been somewhat retarded by the fact that he is a negro, and our publications have persistently spoken of him as the greatest negro painter. It has pleased them to slight his art in the exploitation of his race."

In that same year Tanner was given a highly successful exhibition of his paintings depicting the Life of Christ at the American Art Galleries in New York. "There is almost an artless simplicity about his work," commented a reviewer for The New York Times. "He does not adapt a scriptural theme to latter-day conditions. He simply makes his appeal on broad human grounds, painting his sacred figures simply as men and women moving about their natural background."  In the end, Henry Ossawa Tanner achieved a place in history as an important American painter and as a symbol of hope for the aspirations of his race.

ASSOCIATED CONTENT CHUNKS 

Race and Religion: Henry Ossawa Tanner, Gallery talk by Liz Bola, McDermott Graduate Education Intern for Gallery and Community Teaching, DMA; 2015-04-08; 221230524: UMO

Photograph Print of the artist Henry Ossawa Tanner in 1902 by the Artist Fredrick Gutekunst.

Source: Fredrick Gutekunst, Archives of American Art, Wikimedia Commons, accessed July 14, 2016.

265932453: UMO

3/20/2017- I added more information to the Piction metadata and moved the image to the Online Collections folder for display online. I am removing the %pictionJP and UMO pending tags from this note.