Authors:
Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1
Authors:
Historic Era: Era 7: The Emergence of Modern America (1890-1930)
Historic Theme:
Subject:
February/March 1991 | Volume 42, Issue 1
Dr. Philip Bellefleur had been headmaster of the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf for about three years when he found the painting in 1970. He and a housekeeper had opened the door to a large storage closet, one that hadn’t been opened in five years, perhaps more. Inside they saw scores of dusty boxes and a half-dozen paintings stacked against the wall. After a quick look, Bellefleur concluded that maybe two of the six pictures were valuable—one because it was so large, nine by twelve feet, and the other because it gave him goose bumps.
The large painting proved worthless, but the smaller one was subsequently identified as a work by the black American artist Henry Ossawa Tanner, a successful expatriate in turn-of-the-century France. The picture, called The Thankful Poor, shows an old man and a young boy sitting at a table, praying before a meal. Painted in 1894, it is an example of Tanner’s early foray into black genre, a style at which he excelled but later abandoned. The Thankful Poor was on loan to the nearby Philadelphia Museum of Art for eleven years before it was sold in 1981, fetching $250,000 from the actor Bill Cosby and his wife, Camille, avid art collectors.
Most critics agree that Tanner was an accomplished draftsman, a deft colorist, a painter with a unique ability to capture what one writer called “something passionate and personal and strange.” Though art experts have called him the most talented black painter of the nineteenth century, his work is not widely known. A smattering of exhibitions in the late 1960s and early 1970s rekindled interest in Tanner, as have several shows that examined blacks as artists or blacks in art during the past decade.
An exhibition of Tanner’s work consisting of approximately one hundred paintings and drawings as well as memorabilia has just opened at the Philadelphia Museum of Art; it will travel to the Detroit Institute of Arts, the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, and finally to San Francisco’s M. H. de Young Memorial Museum, where it will remain on view until March 1992. This survey, tracing the artist’s development—from his early experimentation, to his well-wrought academicism, to the looser and lighter style of his later years—will give a new audience a chance to see the qualities that made Tanner one of the most respected painters of his day.
Tanner’s parents, Benjamin and Sarah, met and married in antebellum Pittsburgh. Benjamin, born into a family that had been free for several generations, attended Avery College and Western Theological Seminary, both in Pennsylvania. As a minister and later a prominent bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, he vehemently opposed slavery and often wrote on racial issues. Sarah, born in Winchester, Virginia, was the granddaughter of a white plantation owner. She fled north to freedom in Pennsylvania in the 1840s.