Henry Ossawa Tanner | African American Painter, Religious Artist (2024)

FAQs

Henry Ossawa Tanner | African American Painter, Religious Artist? ›

On May 25, 1937, Tanner died at his home in Paris. Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American artist who earned international acclaim for his religious paintings. His father was a prominent minister and his mother a former slave who escaped the South through the Underground Railroad.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first successful African-American artist. He triumphed in a world that was predominantly white to create paintings of power, beauty and poignancy. Tanner's mother was a black slave who had dramatically escaped via a railroad. His father was a Methodist minister and an abolitionist.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was one of the most distinguished Black artists of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Despite his immense success, Tanner's life story reveals the challenges faced by many Black artists. He was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 21, 1859.

In 1880, when Tanner was twenty-one, he enrolled in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. There he studied with a group of master professors including Thomas Eakins.

Tanner worked primarily with oil paint and he built up his paintings with up to 22 layers of colour. Analysis shows that he had a technique of sandwiching layers of oil and resin between layers of pigmented or unpigmented tempera, a mostly water-based paint that he made according to his own recipe.

Despite being one of the leading religious genre painters of his age, Henry Ossawa Tanner is best remembered for two paintings depicting domestic scenes of African American life and for being the first black artist to gain international fame.

During World War I he served with the American Red Cross in France. In 1923 the French government made Tanner a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1927 he became the first African American to be granted full membership in the National Academy of Design in New York.

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.

He went to Paris in 1891–and stayed there for the rest of his life. Although he only intended to visit Paris before continuing to Rome, Tanner decided after two weeks in the French capital to stay, where he studied at the Académie Julian under Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens.

Tanner also faced racism, because he was an African-American artist in the time period when to be such was an anomaly, and criticism from his peers because he chose to paint religious themes instead of racial ones.

Was Henry Ossawa Tanner white? ›

Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American artist who earned international acclaim for his religious paintings. His father was a prominent minister and his mother a former slave who escaped the South through the Underground Railroad.

Henry Ossawa Tanner's mother, Sarah Elizabeth Miller, was one of eleven children born to a slave who sent her children to freedom by the Underground Railroad. Members of the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society divided the children into various families, sending Sarah to Pittsburgh.

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania to an African Methodist Episcopal (A.M.E.) bishop father and a mother who escaped enslavement via the Underground Railroad. He later became the first African American artist to attain international recognition.

Pittsburgh

Paris

Philadelphia

Gustave Courbet (born June 10, 1819, Ornans, France—died December 31, 1877, La Tour-de-Peilz, Switzerland) was a French painter and leader of the Realist movement.

After Cole's death in 1848, his older contemporary Asher B. Durand (1796–1886) became the acknowledged leader of the New York landscape painters; in 1845, he rose to the presidency of the National Academy of Design, the reigning art institution of the period, and, in 1855–56, published a series of “Letters on Landscape ...

Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Banjo Lesson creates emphasis through size and placement of the figures, as well as the elimination of detail and bright colors in the background.

Thomas was born in Columbus, Georgia, the oldest of four girls. In 1907, her family moved to Washington, D.C., seeking relief from the racial violence in the South. Though segregated, the nation's capital still offered more opportunities for African Americans than most cities in those years.

Horace Pippin took up painting after being injured in World War I, in which he fought with the 369th Infantry, a regiment known as the "Harlem Hellfighters." Pippin's grandparents were enslaved and his life was fraught with poverty, segregation, and racism.

Painter: Guo Xi (c.1020–c.

The piece Early Spring (1072) by Guo Xi, is considered one of the greatest ink paintings of China's Northern Song Dynasty, an era when landscape paintings reached a greater level of sophistication.