![]() Tanner left the Pennsylvania Academy prior to graduating to pursue the idea of combining business with art. It was Eakins who exerted the greatest influence on Tanner's early style. ![]() There he studied with a group of master professors including Thomas Eakins. In 1880, when Tanner was twenty-one, he enrolled in the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His parents encouraged his painting during his recuperation, and Tanner lived at home during the next few years except for several trips to the Adirondack Mountains and Florida for his health. For Tanner, a frail young man whose health was never strong throughout his life, the work in the flour mill proved too strenuous and he became seriously ill. He also studied briefly with two of the city's minor painters.Įager to discourage his son's interest in art, Bishop Tanner apprenticed him to a friend to learn the milling business. ![]() Throughout his teens, Tanner painted and drew constantly in his spare time and tried to look at art as much as possible in Philadelphia art galleries. At age thirteen, Tanner decided to become an artist when he saw a painter at work during a walk in Fairmount Park near his home. In 1864 Tanner's family settled in Philadelphia where his early artistic interests were developed. Tanner's family moved frequently during his early years when his father was assigned to various churches and schools. Sarah Tanner was a former slave whose mother had sent her north to Pittsburgh through the Underground Railroad. Tanner's father was a college-educated teacher and minister who later became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church. Tanner was born on June 21, 1859, in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to Benjamin Tucker and Sarah Miller Tanner. The most distinguished African-American artist of the nineteenth century, Henry Ossawa Tanner was also the first artist of his race to achieve international acclaim. "My effort has been to not only put the Biblical incident in the original setting … but at the same time give the human touch 'which makes the whole world kin' and which ever remains the same." -Lynda Roscoe Hartigan, Sharing Traditions: Five Black Artists in Nineteenth-Century America (Washington D.C., published for National Museum of American Art by the Smithsonian Institution Press, 1985), 106. Washington, D.C.: National Museum of American Art) Lynda Roscoe Hartigan African-American Art: 19th and 20th-Century Selections (brochure. Nonetheless, Tanner's universal subject matter and the international dimensions of his career provided inspiration for future African-American artists. Nor did he align his expressive style with the efforts of African-American artists during the Harlem Renaissance believing that he could not fulfill his artistic potential while fighting discrimination in America, he moved to Paris in 1891. The painting's mottled browns and beiges derive from his training in the French academic tradition influenced by the Impressionists' light and color, he later abandoned his subdued palette.Īlthough Tanner remained active until 1936, he avoided avant-garde developments after 1900. His carefully delineated features and bowed posture create the psychological penetration of a portrait.īased on one of his sketches of Near Eastern men, Tanner's study conveys Christ's timeless humanity, while its sensitivity and strong modeling reveal the artist's admiration for the portraits of his teacher, Thomas Eakins.Īn expressive realism characterizes The Savior, reflecting Tanner's mounting interest in the work of French Symbolist painters at the turn of the century. Has Tanner chosen a particular moment on the mountain, in the Garden of Gethsemane, or just before the Crucifixion? Or has he treated instead the very act of prayer as a means to salvation? Whatever the context, Tanner presents Christ as a man of humble origin rather than as a transcendent, godlike figure. The circumstances of the solitary vigil are ambiguous. ![]() Head bent, gaze intent, hands clasped, The Savior is absorbed in contemplation or prayer. Their deep spirituality reflects Tanner's upbringing as a minister's son as well as the influence of his visits to the Holy Land after 1897. Working in France after 1891, Henry Ossawa Tanner achieved an international reputation largely through his religious paintings. ![]()
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