Summary of Henry Ossawa Tanner
In the late s, amidst America's still largely unenlightened attitude toward race equality, Henry Ossawa Tanner would break from all societal projections and boldly expatriate to Europe where he became the first African American man to achieve international acclaim as a painter. Eschewing the norm not only allowed him to carve his own course through life, but also to transform religious genre painting, the field in which he is best known. He remains the most distinguished African American artist of the nineteenth century.
Accomplishments
- Tanner's spiritual faith was informed early by his relationship with his minister father and would eventually inspire Tanner's most prolific subject matter in his art - religion. Yet, Tanner would contribute to the evolution of the genre by departing from traditional representations of narrative biblical scenes and carving out his own symbolic versions that modernized the field.
- Tanner was adamant about not having his race define him, a motivation that his life in Paris allowed him to adhere to. Yet, ironically, two of his most memorable paintings feature poignant scenes between an African American elder figu
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner is recognized as the first African American artist to gain international fame. During his career, he deftly combined the painting styles of predominantly white academic artists with those of the thriving Black artistic communities of Kansas City.
Tanner was born in in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Benjamin Tanner, a clergyman, and Sarah Tanner, a self-emancipated woman from Virginia. The oldest of five children, Henry was raised in a family that valued religion and fighting for Black equality. His middle name, Ossawa, was a reference to Osawatomie, Kansas, one of abolitionist John Brown’s strongholds, and the site of an battle during the Bleeding Kansas conflict.
When he was 13 years old, Tanner met a landscape artist in his local park and was instantly enthralled. In , he attended the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia as its first Black student. Among his teachers was Thomas Eakins, now regarded as the defining artist of the realism movement in lateth century American art. Eakins was impressed with Tanner’s skill and considered him one of his most promising students. Still, Tanner sometimes suffered racial attack
Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, – May 25, ) was an African American artist best known for his style of painting. He was the first African American painter to gain international acclaim.[1][2]
Education
In Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. His decision to attend the school came at an exciting time in the history of artistic institutional training. Art academies had long relied on tired notions of study devoted almost entirely to plaster cast studies and anatomy lectures. This changed drastically with the addition Thomas Eakins as “Professor of Drawing and Painting” to the Pennsylvania Academy. Eakins encouraged new methods such as study from live models, direct discussion of anatomy in male and female classes, and dissections of cadavers to further familiarity and understanding of the human body. Eakins’s progressive views and ability to excite and inspire his students would have a profound effect on Tanner. The young artist proved to be one of Eakins’s favorite students; two decades after Tanner left the Academy Eakins painted his portrait, making him one of a handful of students to be so honored.[3] At the Academy Tanner befriended ar
Henry Ossawa Tanner
Luce Artist Biography
Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American artist who earned international acclaim for his religious paintings. His father was a prominent minister and his mother a former slave who escaped the South through the Underground Railroad. At age eleven, Tanner decided to become an artist, and nine years later the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts accepted him, the only African American out of two hundred students. At the suggestion of his teacher Thomas Eakins, Tanner tried his hand at photography but had little success. Like many American artists in the nineteenth century, he went to Europe, intending to study in Rome. After fourteen days in Paris, however, he decided to stay in France and enrolled in the Académie Julian. Sales of his paintings of Bible stories financed his trips to Palestine, Egypt, and Morocco. Tanner kept close ties with his native country and was proud of his contributions as a black American, but chose to live in France, where he felt that his race mattered less to other artists and critics.
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