Painting: Methodist in Paris

“For several years,” observed New York’s Current Literature magazine in 1908, “the art world of Paris has shown interest in the work of Henry O. Tanner, an American painter who has done much toward strengthening that high position won for us by Sargent and Whistler. In America, recognition of Tanner’s genius has been retarded by the fact that he is a Negro.”

Tanner never did win great acclaim at home during his lifetime. But now Washington’s National Collection of Fine Arts is about to correct the oversight with a retrospective of 80 paintings, drawings and studies that range from a pastoral done in his student days to a Return from the Crucifixion completed before his death in 1937.

The works on view vary widely in quality. Particularly in Tanner’s later years, when he was living in Paris without being able to sell much work, many of his paintings were second-rate. Yet at his best, he was a draftsman of great ability, a recorder of daily life with understanding and warmth, a religious painter with gifts considerably exceeding those of a mere illustrator.

The fact that Tanner was able to make a career in a sphere that had known virtually no Negroes marked him as a man of exceptional drive. He was also more fortunate in family background and education than were most U.S. Negroes of the period. Born in 1859, the son of an African Methodist minister, the artist was raised in Philadelphia and attended high school. He became entranced with painting at the age of twelve when he saw a landscapist at work during an outing with his father in Fairmount Park.

Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied between 1880 and 1882 under Thomas Eakins, who helped turn him from landscapes to genre scenes. The Banjo Lesson, done in about 1893, is typical in its unsentimental, robust honesty. Tanner’s first one-man show, in Cincinnati, failed to sell a single picture to the public. He sailed in 1891 for Paris, where he must have seemed rather prim to the rowdy French art students who studied with him at the Academie Julien. Thanks to his Methodist upbringing, Tanner refused to touch wine at first. However, he fitted in well enough with American expatriate artists and connoisseurs. He became fast friends with Department Store Heir Rodman Wanamaker and Patent Medicine Heir Atherton Curtis, both of whom collected his work. In 1899, he married a pretty white singer from San Francisco.

Serene Moonlight. In painting as in manners, Tanner was a conservative. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a remarkable popular success. Soon after he arrived in Paris, he began to paint Biblical subjects in Oriental settings. Executed with sinuous vigor of line and a dramatic use of chiaroscuro, these pictures had much in common stylistically with Edouard Vuillard and Art Nouveau. When Daniel in the Lion’s Den was shown in the Paris Salon in 1896, the famous French history painter Jean-Leon Gerome insisted that it be given a place of honor. When the Raising of Lazarus was shown in 1897, it was awarded a medal and purchased by the French government for the Luxembourg Gallery.

In the years before World War I, Tanner developed a special technique of applying his paint in thin, linseed-oil glazes. He began employing a gemlike palette heavily laced with blues and aquamarines. Many of the works done in this later style have cracked and flaked. But some few among them—notably the serenely moonlit Abraham’s Oak —still show how Tanner could take a simple Biblical tale and use it to inspire a unique poetic vision.