Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the twenty-first of June 1859, the eldest child of Benjamin Tucker Tanner — a minister who edited the African Methodist Episcopal Church's Christian Recorder before rising to bishop — and Sarah Elizabeth Tanner, who had come north out of slavery by way of the Underground Railroad. The family settled in Philadelphia, and it was there, as a boy watching a painter at work in Fairmount Park, that Tanner resolved upon his calling.

In 1880 he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the sole Black student in his class, studying under Thomas Eakins, who esteemed him. His early American works — most enduringly The Banjo Lesson (1893) and The Thankful Poor (1894) — rendered ordinary Black life with a tenderness and gravity that refused caricature.

Weary of the prejudice that hemmed his prospects at home, Tanner sailed for Europe in January 1891, intending Rome but settling in Paris, where he trained at the Académie Julian. There he turned chiefly to biblical subjects, luminous and reverent, and won acclaim in the salons — The Resurrection of Lazarus and The Annunciation among the works that carried his name across Europe and America. In 1923 the French government named him a chevalier of the Legion of Honour, and in 1927 he became the first African American elected full member of the National Academy of Design.

Tanner died in Paris on the twenty-fifth of May 1937, the first African American painter to win international renown, and a light by which generations of artists after him found their way.