Henry Ossawa Tanner
This lyrical and evocative landscape is probably the first major painting of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s early maturity; it may have been exhibited soon after completion at both the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design in New York.
Sand Dunes is constructed with a bold sweep of windblown beach bordered by rising dunes. Remarkably, where sand is depicted, the artist actually mixed sand into his pigments to emulate the texture. The viewpoint is that of an isolated stroller on the lonely strand, walking in the shallow trough toward the water’s edge. The water is glimpsed ahead only in calm, low rollers breaking on the beach, the ocean just a sliver below the dusky sky. It is the dunescape itself that mimics the ocean’s eternal motion. In the scrubby vegetation Tanner captures exactly the permanently windbent attitude of the hardy clumps of sea grass that rhythmically stud the sand. The band of cool gray-green shadow that divides the picture seems to echo the movement of the unfelt wind. The sun (out of the picture at the right: we are facing east) tinges the sky with a rosy glow, and the moon rises through the haze of approaching evening.
P.S. Read more about Henry Ossawa Tanner—African-American artistic pioneer here.