Henry Ossawa Tanner

Art, Faith, Race, and Legacy

Naurice Frank Woods, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315279473
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Art
• Subtopic: Histoire de l'art

Over the last forty years, renewed interest in the career of Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) has vaulted him into expanding scholarly discourse on American art. Consequently, he has emerged as the most studied and recognized representative of African American art during the nineteenth century. In fact, Tanner, in the spirit of political correctness and racial inclusiveness, has gained a prominent place in recent textbooks on mainstream American art and his painting, The Banjo Lesson (1893), has become an iconic symbol of black creativity. In addition, Tanner achieved national recognition when the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1991 and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 2012 celebrated him with major retrospectives. The latter exhibition brought in a record number of viewers. While Tanner lived a relatively simple life where his faith and family dictated many of the choices he made daily, his emergence as a prominent black artist in the late nineteenth century often thrust him openly into coping with the social complexities inherent with America's great racial divide. In order to fully appreciate how he negotiated prevailing prejudices to find success, this book places him in the context of a uniquely talented black man experiencing the demands and rewards of nineteenth-century high art and culture. By careful examination on multiple levels previously not detailed, this book adds greatly to existing Tanner scholarship and provides readers with a more complete, richly deserved portrait of this preeminent American master.

1Of the Father and of the Son

The Rise of Benjamin and Henry Tanner

Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.

Proverbs 22:6

Take firm hold of instruction, do not let go; Keep her, for she is your life.

Proverbs 4:13

In October 1860, Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner, the father of Henry Ossawa Tanner, took a temporary assignment as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC. He soon sent for his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Miller Tanner, and infant son, Henry, who were still living in Pittsburgh. Shortly afterward, Sarah decided to go shopping somewhere in the nation’s capital and she procured transportation accompanied by her baby. The first leg of her trip was uneventful, but returning home proved problematic and possibly life-threatening. A heavy snowfall later in the day forced mother and child to consider riding a streetcar home. City law prohibited black riders, but Sarah, out of desperation, boldly decided to attempt a ruse to board the car. She pulled a veil over her face to disguise her racial identity and uncovered the face of her light-complexioned, auburn-haired child to fool those who sat inside. Unfortunately, two male passengers discovered their presence and remarked, “Who, what have we here a nigger, stop the car.”¹ Once revealed, mother and child found themselves ejected into the frigid night.

Henry Ossawa Tanner, at a little more than one year of age, had become the unwitting pawn in a struggle between the races that left most people of African descent at a distinct disadvantage. Sarah Tanner was certainly disadvantaged to the point where her survival, and that of her little son, depended on a successful passage across racial lines at a time when the notion and nature of race, primarily in the form of slavery, dominated much social, political, and economic thought and action in America. Although they survived their ordeal that day, Sarah knew that they had been lucky and blessed, and that similar incidents were likely to befall them in the future. She surely wondered what life would be like for young Henry in the midst of uncertain and turbulent times. She and her family were, after all, part of a larger population of African Americans, both slave and free, whose fate would not be reconciled until long after the end of the prolonged and bloody Civil War.

Tanner learned of the incident years later and it had a profound effect upon him. He wrote:

I never knew this story till I was a grown man and we were in our Diamond Street house in Philadelphia near East Park. I left the house immediately and it took several hours walking in among the trees and under the night skies to cool the heat and hatred that had surged in my bosom. I have no recollection of ever going back there [Washington] till on a trip from Paris I found my mother living there with my sister and I went there for a few days. One day we took a streetcar and a distinguished looking middle age man of the same race that had formerly ejected that same mother and son arose and gave my mother a seat. My mother said it was not a very rare thing, but I always thanked God I had seen it.²

Tanner’s mother may have reminded him of that long ago incident as a sign that progress was being made between the races, perhaps in an effort to calm him over a recent racially motivated occurrence directed against him while transitioning from the more tolerant atmosphere of Paris where he now resided. There he was Henry O. Tanner, American artist—a respected and acknowledged painter of merit even among many of his white compatriots sharing similar experiences abroad. At home, however, he was more than likely to find himself on the receiving end of vile racial insults and to be “reassigned” to a place of subordination among whites. The story told by Sarah Tanner merely reinforced what he already knew—that America, even in the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, had not even come close to resolving the issue of race and equality and that he was still as vulnerable as any black person to mistreatment based solely on his ethnic identity. His response to being “cast out” as a child was, “May God forgive them for even at this distant day it is hard for me to do so.”³ It is likely that he echoed that sentiment for most of his life.

Tanner’s life was an ongoing struggle to overcome the limitations of race as imposed on African Americans and, ultimately, to achieve greatness at the highest levels of nineteenth-century academic art. In order to realize this lofty goal Tanner subjected himself to rigors of body, mind, and spirit that transcended the experiences of most African Americans of his day. On numerous occasions, he would find himself “cast out,” as he had been in infancy, by prejudiced associates, acquaintances, strangers, and country, only to be rescued repeatedly by his resolute determination and with the help of those whom he regarded as close friends.

Tanner’s passage through the crippling effects of racism to critical international acclaim began with his birth on June 21, 1859 in Pittsburgh. Fortunately for the newborn, his father and mother were able to provide him with a stable and relatively comfortable environment that gained him important educational and cultural advantages that allowed him to escape much of the “plague of perceived inferiority” that stood in his way to becoming a great artist.

He was also fortunate to have the opportunity to learn from his father’s experiences of growing up black in America. One admirer described Benjamin Tanner as “a mulatto of medium size, about 5 feet, 8 inches, weighing around 190 pounds, modest and genteel, sociable and pleasant in conversation.”⁴ He was also a proud, self-reliant, and deeply spiritual man. These characteristics helped sustain him through the difficult and often hostile times that he faced trying to survive and advance in a white-dominated society. He was born in late December 1835 to Hugh and Isabella Tanner in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania into a family that had known freedom for several generations. Tanner later recalled that his father often boasted with pride of being a “Pittsburgher of three generations.”⁵ He also stated that his father used the expression when his “fur had been rubbed the wrong way.”⁶ Freedom from slavery in the South gave Benjamin the opportunity to gain an education and, after becoming only one of the less than 6 percent of the total black population in the United States at the time that was literate, he set his sights on college as a means of personal advancement. Barbering to pay for his expenses, Benjamin attended Allegheny Institute (later known as Avery College) for a year, refusing to accept free tuition from the school’s founder, lay Methodist minister and abolitionist Charles Avery, although he was impoverished, his father was dead, and he had to care for his mother. The reason for this behavior is indicative of his character. As William J. Simmons stated, “His whole nature was independent; for he might have sweetened his life some and smoothed many a road over which he passed, but he preferred to work and win.”⁷ He later studied for three years at Pittsburgh’s Western Theological Seminary where he graduated in 1860. Benjamin’s decision to become a minister had a profound effect on his life and career.

While still a student at Western in 1858, he acquired a license to preach in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church. Thus began a long and distinguished career in service to that denomination. Also as a student at Western, Benjamin demonstrated publically his passion for combating racial intolerance. One an evening in March 1859, he attended a lecture by Fanny Kemble, the celebrated antislavery activist, at the Masonic Hall in Pittsburgh. He took a seat in the section assigned for whites only and a US Deputy Marshal asked him to move to the black area. Tanner refused and the Marshal threw him out.⁸ This defiant act, which precursors the sit-ins sparked by the Civil Rights Movement more than 100 years later, marked Benjamin Tanner as a man who refused to accept his assigned place in life. From an early age, Benjamin Tanner exhibited a profound willingness to fight for equality amid a climate of racial intolerance. This desire for civil justice and self-determination was a precious gift that he would pass on to his children.

A clue to Benjamin’s defiance comes from one of his journal entries. In an eloquent passage, he addressed the plight of all African Americans who labored in the shadow of injustice, bigotry, and inferiority while many in white society placed the blame on them as victims of their own racial ineptitude. Tanner wrote:

If the colored people would only do right is the cry from the parlor to the kitchen, from the Senate Hall to the country squire shanty. “Colored people won’t do right.” Right, what do they mean by right, is it to see while yet their eyes have been put out, to love labor while yet they are taught none but the meanest work—to love their country, while yet it brands them the most infamous on earth. To love their race while yet from infancy they are taught to believe their natural inferiority. If colored people would do right. Oh yes, to do that “right” we would not be men.⁹

The year 1856 proved especially important to Benjamin. Not only was it the year he officially joined the AME Church, but it was also the year he met Sarah Elizabeth Miller. She was born on May 18, 1840, in Winchester, Virginia to a slave mother, Elizabeth, and a free black father, Charles. Since Virginia law required that the offspring of an enslaved mother acquire her status, Sarah grew up bound and severely restricted. She later obtained her freedom after Elizabeth managed to send her children to the North on the Underground Railroad.¹⁰ Once safely across the Mason–Dixon Line, the Pennsylvania Abolitionist Society dispersed the group throughout the area with Sarah settling in with a family in Pittsburgh. She attended Avery Institute and later taught there. Benjamin married her on August 19, 1858, and they would eventually have nine children (two, Benjamin and Horace, died in infancy), the first being Henry Ossawa (Figure 1.1). Sarah shared her husband’s love for learning and ran a private neighborhood school out of the family home.¹¹ There is no doubt she and her husband saw to it that Henry and all their other children possessed the greatest weapon an African American of the nineteenth century could use to combat racism—an excellent education.

Figure 1.1The Tanner Family, c. 1890. Left to right: Isabella; Halle; her daughter, Sadie; Henry; Bishop Tanner; Carlton; Mrs. Tanner; Bertha; Sarah; and Mary.

The naming of their first-born carried significant meaning for the Tanners, especially in the selection of his middle name where Reverend Tanner’s strong personal feelings about the times in which he lived became part of Henry’s legacy. Reacting to the passage of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 that mandated to all citizens of any state where escaped slaves fled the obligation of returning them to their masters upon their discovery and to impose criminal sanctions on those who aided runaways, Benjamin Tanner wrote in 1851:

Among the many laws with which a certain portion of the human family is doomed to endure, none is held in such abhorre...