Henry Ossawa Tanner

1859 - 1937 • American • Painter • Realist

"Many painters of religious subjects forget that their pictures should be as much works of art as are other paintings with less holy subjects. Whenever such painters assume that because they are treating a more elevated subject than their brother artists they may be excused from giving artistic value to their work or from being careful about a color harmony, for instance, they simply prove that they are less sincere than he who gives the subject his best attention." - Henry Ossawa Tanner

The son of a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner grew up in Philadelphia, where he studied with EAKlNS at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. Though encouraged by Eakins, as a black man Tanner faced many roadblocks in America. Paris was far more accommodating; he loved the city and settled there permanently, enrolling in the ACADEMIE JULIAN. His best-known work, accepted at the SALON of r 894, is The Tha11kful Poor ( r 894), a painting that shows his interest in the quality of light, in this instance a holy luminosity, and the quiet piety of good people-an elderly man and a boy seated at table saying grace. In the tradition of MILLET, this is a sentimental dramatization of religious faith among the poor. Though sometimes, as in the instance just mentioned, Tanner painted black people, and he called race a "ghetto of isolation and neglect," race was not his primary artistic concern-religious subjects were his abiding themes, as his comment, quoted above, suggests.