Henry Ossawa Tanner
We want to remind you of Black History Month with this great painting created by Henry Ossawa Tanner.
Henry Ossawa Tanner was the United States’ first African-American celebrity artist. He trained at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and at the Académie Julian in Paris (with Jean-Léon Gérôme), which helped him to combine two vastly different approaches to painting—American Realism and French academic painting.
The United States had abolished slavery in 1865, only 28 years before this painting was created. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh within the tight-knit world of highly educated members of America’s burgeoning African-American intelligentsia. His mother Sarah, however, had been born a slave and 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.
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. It shows an elderly black man teaching a boy, assumed to be his grandson, how to play the banjo. For Tanner, painting this image of generational torch-passing, was a way of demolishing stereotypes of African-Americans. In popular minstrel shows they were shown as boisterous, buffoonish, and dim-witted. With The Banjo Lesson Tanner shows a very different picture.
Tanner, after painting The Banjo Lesson, came back to France where he stayed for the most of his life. He felt better there. He said: “In America, I’m Henry Tanner, Negro artist, but in France, I’m ‘Monsieur Tanner, l’artiste américain.‘”
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