The first famous Black American artist - Henry Ossawa Tanner (2024)

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What was Henry Ossawa Tanner best known for? ›

Henry Ossawa Tanner was an African American painter who frequently depicted biblical scenes and is best known for the paintings "Nicodemus Visiting Jesus," "The Banjo Lesson" and "The Thankful Poor."

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859 – 1937) was an American artist and teacher who is widely recognized as the first African American to achieve international acclaim as a painter.

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.

In The Banjo Lesson, Tanner's desire to show us his vision of the resilience, spiritual grace, and creative and intellectual promise of post-Civil War African-Americans is fully realized.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was the first successful African-American artist. He triumphed in a world that was predominantly white to create paintings of power, beauty and poignancy. Tanner's mother was a black slave who had dramatically escaped via a railroad. His father was a Methodist minister and an abolitionist.

Tanner worked primarily with oil paint and he built up his paintings with up to 22 layers of colour. Analysis shows that he had a technique of sandwiching layers of oil and resin between layers of pigmented or unpigmented tempera, a mostly water-based paint that he made according to his own recipe.

In his later years, Tanner was a symbol of hope and inspiration f or African-American leaders and young black artists, many of whom visited him in Paris. On May 25, 1937, Tanner died at his home in Paris.

In 1995, the White House Historical Association acquired a Tanner painting titled Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City from his grandniece Rae Alexander-Minter. It was the first painting by a Black artist acquired for the White House Collection.

Intending to settle in Rome, Tanner fell in love with Paris and remained there to study at the Academie Julien, soon painting two of his most important works depicting Africa-American subjects, The Banjo Lesson, from 1893 and The Thankful Poor in 1894.

Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Banjo Lesson creates emphasis through size and placement of the figures, as well as the elimination of detail and bright colors in the background.

Which of the following art movements influenced Henry Ossawa Tanner's style of painting? ›

Tanner immediately took to his studies under the teachers Jean-Joseph Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. He became fascinated with the Symbolist and Impressionist art movements as well as the French countryside after taking summer trips to Brittany.

The Resurrection of Lazarus depicts Jesus using his abilities to bring back his friend Lazarus from the dead. Probably the most powerful aspect of the painting is not Jesus or even Lazarus, but instead, the group of people who are watching the action take place.

Art historian John Wilmerding observed that The Seine is surprisingly modern when compared with the majority of Tanner's works, noting that “the soft colors and gauzy silhouettes, the open expanse of water and sky, and the high horizon serving to flatten the spatial recession are all Whistlerian in character.” Perhaps ...

Sir Henry Raeburn is perhaps the best known of all Scottish painters. He was almost exclusively a portraitist and his career was wholly in Scotland, mainly in Edinburgh. Apprenticed to a jeweller, it is not precisely known how Raeburn's attention turned to painting.

Before leaving, Tanner sent his Resurrection of Lazarus to the Paris Salon where it was awarded a third class medal and was purchased by the French government for exhibition at the Luxemb ourg Gallery and eventually entered the collection of the Louvre.

Jean-Michel Basquiat (born December 22, 1960, Brooklyn, New York, U.S.—died August 12, 1988, New York City) was an American painter known for his raw gestural style of painting with graffiti-like images and scrawled text.