Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh on the twenty-first of June 1859, the son of Benjamin Tucker Tanner — an AME bishop and editor of the Christian Recorder — and Sarah Elizabeth Miller. (Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander — also placed in this archive — was his niece.) He took up painting at thirteen after watching an artist work in Fairmount Park and pursued it against family hopes that he would follow his father into the ministry.

He entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1879 as the only Black student in his class, studied under Thomas Eakins, and produced through the 1880s a body of work — portraits, genre scenes, and pictures of Black Philadelphia — that established his early reputation.

He sailed for Paris in 1891 to escape what he later described as the routine racial exhaustion of working as an artist in the United States. He spent most of the remaining forty-six years of his life in France. He studied at the Académie Julian and exhibited at the Paris Salon from 1894. His religious paintings — The Annunciation (1898), Daniel in the Lions' Den (1896), The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896) — drew sustained critical recognition; The Resurrection of Lazarus was purchased by the French government for the Musée du Luxembourg, the principal honor available to a contemporary artist in late-nineteenth-century France.

He was made a Chevalier of the French Legion of Honour in 1923 — the first African American painter so honored. He continued to paint, exhibit, and mentor younger African American artists in Paris until his death at his Paris home on the twenty-fifth of May 1937, age seventy-seven.

He is honored here as the painter whose Paris career proved that African American art could meet any international standard.