Born on June 21, 1859, Tanner was the first African-American painter to gain international renown.
His father was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, his mother an escaped slave. The family was affluent, well educated and reluctant to allow Tanner to pursue his interest in painting. But his parents eventually responded to their son's unflagging desire to pursue an artistic career and encouraged his ambitions.
In 1879, he enrolled to study at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. He was the only black student and became a favorite of the painter Thomas Eakins, who had recently started teaching there.
He also made other connections among artists, including Robert Henri. In the late 1890s he was sponsored for a trip to Palestine by Rodman Wanamaker, who was impressed by his paintings of Biblical themes.
Tanner moved to Atlanta in 1889 in an unsuccessful attempt to support himself as an artist and instructor among prosperous middle class African-Americans. Bishop and Mrs. Joseph C. Hartzell arranged for Tanner's first solo exhibition, the proceeds from which enabled the struggling artist to move to Paris in 1891. Illness brought him back to the United States in 1893, and it was at this point in his career that Tanner turned his attention to genre subjects of his own people.
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| The Banjo Lesson, 1893 |
It was his painting, "The Banjo Lesson, "that turned out to be not only popular but very radical for the time. The painting shows an elderly black man teaching a boy, assumed to be his grandson, how to play the banjo. Unlike the usual, for the time, stereotypes of Blacks as foolish entertainers, the painting shows a sensitive and loving interaction between an older man and a young boy, presumed to be his grandson.
Tanner undertakes the difficult endeavor of portraying two separate and varying light sources. A natural white, blue glow from outside enters from the left while the warm light from a fireplace is apparent on the right. The figures are illuminated where the two light sources meet; some have hypothesized this as a manifestation of Tanner’s situation in transition between two worlds, his American past and his new home in France.
He moved to Paris in 1891 to study, and spent the rest of his life there, being readily accepted in French artistic circles
In his autobiography The Story of an Artist’s Life, Tanner describes the burden of racism:
"I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain. Every time any one of these disagreeable incidents came into my mind, my heart sank, and I was anew tortured by the thought of what I had endured, almost as much as the incident itself."
In 1899, Tanner married a white American singer, Jessie Olssen. The couple's only child, Jesse, was born in 1903. It was their marriage and the way the couple was treated that influenced Tanner's decision to settle permanently in France, where the family divided its time between Paris and a farm near Etaples in Normandy.
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| Spinning by firelight. |
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| Daniel in the Lions' Den, 1907–1918 |
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| The Resurrection of Lazarus |
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| The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water, ca. 1907 |
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| Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1885. Oil on canvas, 30 x 59 inches. When Henry Ossawa Tanner's "Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City" was added to the White House art collection in 1996, it was celebrated for the excellence of the work and the character of its artist |
Throughout much of the rest of his life, even as he shifted his focus to religious scenes, Tanner continued to receive praise and honors for his work.
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
Henry Ossawa Tanner died at his Paris home on May 25, 1937.
