Making the Whole World Kin
An Appreciation of Henry Ossawa Tanner

WITHIN NINE YEARS OF MOVING ABROAD, Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-37), America's first major African-American artist, had become an international success. By 1900, he ranked among the leading American artists in Paris and was widely considered the premier biblical painter of his day. Exhibiting regularly at the Paris Salon, he was attracting even greater critical acclaim than Thomas Eakins, his former mentor at the Pennsylvania Academy. His studio at 51, rue Saint-Jacques had become a destination for Americans on cultural pilgrimage.

Writing for Cosmopolitan in 1900, Vance Thompson commented:

There is no American artist in Paris more talked about than Mr. H.O..Tanner. . . . Mr. Tanner is not only a Biblical painter; not only a Philadelphian; but, as well, he has brought to modern art a new spirit.

The artist's "new spirit" owed much to the shaping power of the particular branch of American Protestantism in which he was raised. The African Methodist Episcopal Church, founded in protest against slavery, colored his embrace of biblical imagery. Tanner understood his own struggles as an African-American painter in biblical terms. [His family legacy is couched in his middle name: Ossawa is a cloaked reference to Osawatomie, Kansas, where John Brown killed pro-slavery advocates in a bloody prelude to the Civil War.]

That intuition gestated throughout his early career until it was summoned to life at the Académie Julien under the tutelage of Jean-Joseph Benjamin-Constant, fashionable Orientalist and painter of scriptural motifs. Added to that influence was the subtle capillary action of French piety—with its intense Marian cast—on a religiously sensitive temperament. The result was fertile ground for biblical narratives wonderfully distinguished from those by more typical salonniers.

Tanner summarized his purposes in 1924, "My efforts have been to not only put the Biblical incident in the original setting, but at the same time give the human touch 'which makes the whole world kin' and which ever remains the same." Biblical subject matter permitted him to achieve something more universal than the "school of Negro art" that critics such as African-American scholar Alain Locke wanted from him. It was in France and in biblical motifs that Tanner found a means to transcend considerations of race.

While race was indelibly present in figurative work centered on black models, the sitter's humanity, not skin color, was his enduring subject. Tanner's Portrait of the Artist's Mother (c. 1897) testifies to his ability—crucial in any serious artist—to adapt the technical and compositional moves of predecessors to his own purposes. The woman's gesture—one hand against her cheek, the other dropped in her lap—echoes Eakins' 1891 portrait of Amelia Van Buren. While the composition is designed after James Abbott McNeil Whistler's celebrated Arrangement in Grey and Black #1: Portrait of the Artist's Mother (1871), Tanner's variation, informed by Eakins, more fully summons a human presence.

The angular austerity of Whistler's composition hints at the Calvinist streak in his mother's New England mettle. Still, stress is on the figure as a structural element, one abstract form in play with others. Tanner, by contrast, recasts the composition and lighting to create a tender cameo of a reflective woman in reverie. Her meditative mood infuses the darksome composition, punctuated by soft light, with a gravity greater than the sum of formal arrangements. Viewers have no doubt that the subject of the painting is the inwardness of the sitter, not the devices of picture-making.

The Thankful Poor (1894) and The Banjo Lesson (c.1893) represent the kind of black genre painting initially expected from Tanner. In the former, a man and boy, presumably a grandson, both black, sit at table with their heads bowed to say grace over their meal. Race here is incidental to rituals rooted in the larger culture. His audience would have recognized the subject's affinity with Millais's renowned The Angelus. (c.1857) or Chardin's La Benedicite (c. 1740). Piety and thanksgiving observe no color line.

A good detective might want to find out if Norman Rockwell, an inspired scavenger through the art historical bin, was familiar with The Thankful Poor and its wide popularity. Rockwell's own best loved Saturday Evening Post cover was Saying Grace (November 24, 1951). Here again are the generations—the boy accompanied by a grandmother this time—joined in the same gesture of gratitude over a simple meal in a railroad station diner. Rockwell, like Tanner, places his familial couple in front of a curtained window. While the emotional tenor is the polar opposite of Tanner's, the pictorial and thematic core is intriguingly similar. Rockwell's familial pair draw amused curiosity from fellow diners—sly surrogates for the culture at large—
unaccustomed to public displays of piety. Tanner's depiction takes audience intimacy with mealtime grace for granted. Yet in both, the reverence of the praying couple is the unaffected heart of the motif.

Emphasis on the transmission of culture to the young is a constant of Tanner's figurative work. His most famous painting, The Banjo Lesson follows the lead of Homer and Eakins in depicting black subjects with equal dignity, as individuals rather than stereotypes. At the same time, its depiction of an older black man tutoring an adolescent boy, each absorbed in the drill, is of a piece with other paintings from the same period using Breton subjects: The Young Sabot Maker and The Bagpipe Lesson . The theme threads through even such later paintings as Christ Learning to Read (1911).

Tanner's first Salon success, Daniel in the Lions' Den (1896), departed from conventional compositions that highlight a heroic Daniel, eyes heavenward, in a threatening circle of lions. Tanner's Daniel, in Babylonian day wear, hugs the shadows. His head is down, his back to the wall. The prophet is taking no chances even though the pacing lions have that listless look of the ones in the Jardin de Plantes where Tanner sketched them. The loveliest surprise of the work lies in the artist's dramatic massing of dark and light. A single downward shaft breaks the pervading gloom with warm tonal harmonies.

The Annunciation (1898), the first of Tanner's works purchased for an American museum, is a marvelous blend of academic realism and abstract invention. No winged angel appears, no benedictory gesture. The God-bearing word travels, as ever, at the speed of light; Tanner's Gabriel is a radiant blade of luminescence. Gone is the Lady of medieval imagining, interrupted at her psalter. Here is a dark-haired peasant girl, from the hills of Galilee, who never held a book. A teenaged Miriam, hands in her lap, looks into the light, weighing the message.

Note that single, sturdy bare foot that peeks out from a cascade of drapery. It is a small touch but one that marks Tanner's deliberate distance from centuries of Marian typology. The Virgin might have bared one breast to suckle her baby, but she was rarely, if ever, depicted barefoot. You might think she never really touched the floor. But traditional images of Mary nursing had a singular purpose: to affirm the humanity of Christ. Tanner, here, emphasizes the humanity of Mary. No need, then, for the exaggerated modesty of a shod foot.

Her exaggerated drapery, however, serves a purpose. A tad lavish for historical accuracy, its undulating spread provides pictorial counter to the geometry of an otherwise spartan interior. In addition, the technical demands of the pendant droop declare Tanner's brotherhood with Bouguereau, Messioner, Gérôme, Cabanel, Bastian-Lepage and other prize-winning stars of the Salon.

Mary (1910), a rediscovered painting now in the collection of Michael Rosenfeld Gallery, puts Whistler to use again but in a thoroughly unexpected way. Composed on a low bench, Mary's body forms a right angle that dominates the canvas. Her swaddled infant is lying on the floor and so close to her instep that, at quick glance, the tiny figure suggests the foot rest Whistler placed at his mother's feet. That slim circlet of light, a shy halo, hovering over the baby's head is almost invisible. A luminous Mary is the painting's single source of light. Hands in her lap and foregoing any attitude of adoration, she sits in perfect equilibrium contemplating her handiwork, as any first time mother would. At the same time, something disconsolate marks her composure. Her long thick veil—heavy with dense applications of white lead—carries the weight of a winding cloth.

Angels Appearing before the Shepherds (c. 1910-11) enlivens a conventional scene by presenting it from the angels' angle of vision. It is a cinematic device that suggests acquaintance with the movies, an industry in full throttle by 1910. (Think of angelic rooftop vigils in Wim Wender's more recent Wings of Desire.) Translucent vice-regents from God's throne look down on distant shepherds huddled with their flock. Nighttime terrain is cool-hued and barren; these mortals could use a glad word. Tanner indicates the shepherds' moment of illumination by warming the ground under them. A hint of green sweetens the melancholy blues and violets of the darkling landscape. Light does not descend, as expected, from bright angelic choristers. Instead, their office fulfilled, Tanner's messengers are dim and spectral. Only the men, and a few forward sheep, brighten with the tidings, as if from within.

The character of art is not determined by subject matter; it resides in handling. Tanner orchestrated biblical iconography with the same sense of structure and light—a critical empathy—with which he ordered landscapes of France and North Africa. Sodom and Gomorrah (c. 1920-24), once owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a stirring testament to Tanner's brushwork, coloristic agility and feeling for the scale of things before it is a Holy Land anecdote. Compressing detail to a minimum, Lot's wife is a simple white form, brilliant against a brooding, agitated sky of variegated blues scumbled and glazed to perfection.

It was a thrill to see it together with Tanner's plein-air gem Birthplace of Joan of Arc (1918) in New York last year. Tanner's near-contemporaneity with Monet is visible in the delicate tonal range and shifting hues of the earlier painting. Both illustrate the confidence and grace of Tanner's hand and his embrace of Delacroix's conviction that "the first quality in a picture is to be a delight for the eye."

Art history is as vulnerable to fashion as the artists it renders passé. Bowing to mid-20th century taste, the Metropolitan deaccessioned Sodom and Gomorrah at public auction in 1956. The canvas disappeared into private hands until Michael Rosenfeld, a leading dealer of historic African-American art, added it to his gallery's collection a few years ago. (Rediscovery of Tanner owes much to the gallery's search for neglected Tanner works.)

The pace of restoring Tanner to cultural memory has been slow, despite the Clinton White House's purchase of an 1886 landscape for the East Wing collection of American paintings. Full recognition is due. Not because Tanner was black but because his work is splendid. That was the judgment of the age in which he lived, and a vital part of our national conversation between past and present.

A version of this essay appeared first The Magazine Antiques, September 2009.