Henry Ossawa Tanner, was an extraordinary painter who gained international acclaim for his depiction of landscapes and biblical themes. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania on June 21, 1859. Tanner’s middle name, Ossawa, was derived from the Kansas town of Osawatomie where abolitionist John Brown began advocating against slavery in the wake of the 1854 Kansas-Nebraska Act. Tanner's father was a college-educated teacher and minister who later became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia in 1869, where he attended the public schools. There his father became a friend of Frederick Douglass, sometimes supporting him, sometimes criticizing. Tanner was self taught in his youth, but sought out formal art training.
At age 13, inspired by an artist painting in a local park, he committed himself to a career in art despite his father’s initial discouragement. However, he worked in a family friend's flour business until his fragile health broke down. While he recuperated in the Adirondacks and then in Florida, he sketched and painted. His parents encouraged his painting during his recuperation, and Tanner lived at home during the next few years except for several trips to the Adirondack Mountains and Florida for his health. Throughout his teens, Tanner painted and drew constantly in his spare time painting harbor scenes, landscapes, and animals from the Philadelphia Zoo. He tried to look at art as much as possible in Philadelphia art galleries. He also studied briefly with two of the city's minor painters.
In 1880 Tanner began two years of formal study under Thomas Eakins at Philadelphia’s prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), where he was the only Black student in his class of 100. Many artists refused to accept an African-American apprentice. Eakins had the greatest influence on Tanner’s early style. He achieved modest success as an artist in Philadelphia. In 1888 Tanner left the Academy before graduating in order to establish a photography gallery in Atlanta, Georgia where he attempted to earn a living selling his art, making photographs. Although this venture failed, Tanner remained in Atlanta through 1890. This failed attempt spurred his belief that only in Europe could he pursue his dream of becoming a successful artist.
While in Atlanta, Tanner met Mr. and Mrs. Joseph Crane Hartzell, a bishop from Cincinnati, Ohio, who were to become his primary White patrons over the next several years. In the summer of 1888 Tanner sold his small gallery and moved to Highlands, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains where he hoped to study and earn a living by his photography. He also felt that the mountains would be good for his delicate health, While there, Tanner may have made many sketches and photographs of the region and its African-American residents, some of which were later used as subjects in his most important early paintings. In the fall of 1888, Tanner returned to Atlanta and taught drawing for two years at Clark College.
After discussing his ambitions to travel abroad with Bishop and Mrs. Hartzell, they arranged an exhibition of Tanner’s works in Cincinnati in the fall of 1890. When no paintings sold, Hartzell purchased the entire collection himself. This endowment allowed Tanner to sail for Rome in January 1891. After brief stays in Liverpool and London, Tanner arrived in Paris. He was so impressed by this center of art and artists that he abandoned his plans to study in Rome. In Paris, France, Tanner enroll at the Académie Julian where he studied under painters Jean-Paul Laurens and Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant. He also joined the American Art Students Club of Paris, and quickly found acceptance in Parisian society. He found the environment stimulating and a stark contrast to the oppression and segregation he experienced in Atlanta.
Benjamin-Constant took particular interest in Tanner’s work and encouraged him to create a piece to enter at the Salon du Société des Artistes Français. This effort resulted in The Bagpipe Lesson, which established a significant theme in Tanner’s works. During the summers of 1892 and 1893, Tanner left Paris and lived in isolated rural areas in Brittany. In 1893, Tanner contracted typhoid fever and returned to Philadelphia to recover. While recovering he delivered a paper on Black art at the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago. During this time, he reflected on the humiliating caricatures that constituted the normal depiction of African Americans at the time. Soon after, he painted his most important works depicting African American subjects, "The Banjo Lesson" (1893) and "The Thankful Poor" (1894).
Soon after, Tanner turned his attention to painting religious subjects and experimented with different colors and light to achieve the desired results of portraying the intensity and fire of religious moments. He gained recognition for his powerful paintings of biblical scenes, as well as his poignant depictions of African-Americans as individuals with grace and dignity, which was rare during a time where stereotypes and caricatures were the norm. Black people had long been stereotyped as entertainers. They appeared in minstrel shows as buffoonish, ridiculous and dim-witted. Images propagated this idea that even if Black people were no longer slaves, they were still inferior. Tanner was one of the first to reel against this idea. He painted Black people with grace, dignity and sensitivity. It was a work of this type that was, in 1894, were being exhibited at the annual Paris Salon.
In 1895, his painting "Daniel in the Lions’ Den" was accepted into the Salon de Paris, and his work began to be acquired by French museums. Two years later, Tanner's "Resurrection of Lazarus", also biblical in theme, won a medal at the Paris Salon of 1897, a rare achievement for an American artist. Later that year the French government purchased the painting. In 1897, at the height of his career, Tanner left Paris to visit his parents, who had relocated to Kansas City, Kansas. During this visit, Tanner’s artistic style transformed. Influenced by the city’s vibrant community of Black artists, he adopted a more abstract style, using quick, heavy brush strokes and thick paint. While in Kansas City, he created three portraits, one of his father and two of his mother, in much the same style as he had painted previously.
After touring the Holy Land in 1897–98, which had a profound impact on his paintings, Tanner painted "Nicodemus Visiting Jesus", which in 1900 won the PAFA’s Lippincott Prize. The Salon paintings were followed by a series of critically acclaimed religious works that established Tanner as one of the most celebrated artists of that time. That same year he received a medal at the Universal Exposition in Paris. He remained an expatriate in France, routinely exhibiting in Paris as well as the United States, and winning several awards. He is the first Black artist to have his or her paintings exhibit at the Louvre. By the mid-1890s, Tanner was a success, critically admired both in the United States and Europe.
In 1899, Tanner met Jessie Macauley Olssen, an American singer of Swedish descent who was 15 years his junior and was vacationing with her family in France. Their interracial marriage was considered scandalous, even in progressive Paris. The family took up residence in Paris, buying a farm near Etaples in Normandy where they spent many summers near an artist colony in which Tanner participated. Booker T. Washington visited him in Paris that year, and Tanner painted Washington’s portrait. By the turn of the century, Tanner's work was regularly winning major prizes; its forms were also was growing increasingly simplified, largely through the use of a more limited palette and glazing techniques, and its content increasingly spiritual.
Among his other works are "The Annunciation", "Abraham’s Oak", and "The Two Disciples at the Tomb", which is now part of the permanent collection of the Art Institute of Chicago. All of these works were celebrated award-winners that firmly established his lasting reputation as a painter of religious themes. In 1908, his first solo exhibition of religious paintings in the United States was held at the American Art Galleries in New York. Tanner was made an associate member of the National Academy of Design in 1909. He was a regular contributor to the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP) after it was founded in 1909.
During World War I he served with the Red Cross in France and made sketches and paintings of the soldiers on the front lines. While he was serving in the war, the prejudice he encountered left deep emotional scars that were reflected in his stiff paintings of American soldiers. Tanner made his last trip to the United States to promote his work in 1923. In 1923 he was decorated by the French government as as Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, the highest national order of merit. He considered this "citation by the French government to be the greatest honor of his illustrious career. In 1927 he became the first Black man to be granted full membership in the National Academy of Design in New York, the first Black artist to ever receive the distinction. In his later years, Tanner was a symbol of hope to young Black artists, many of whom visited him in Paris.
Though he wasn’t part of the Harlem Renaissance, many African American artists of that era took inspiration in what Tanner achieved during his lifetime. Tanner met with fellow Black artist Palmer Hayden in Paris around 1927. They discussed artistic technique and he gave Hayden advice on interacting with French society. He was also helped other Harlem Renaissance artists, studying in France, including Hale Woodruff, and Romare Bearden. On May 25, 1937, Tanner died at his home in Paris. After his death in 1937, Tanner’s artistic stature declined until 1969, when the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C., exhibited several of his works. This was the first major solo exhibition of a Black artist in the United States. His artistic legacy is that of an incredibly talented and innovative artist who achieved international success, despite the racism that plagued him throughout his personal and professional life.
