Before delving into his Tangier works, we need to deepen our understanding of how being labeled as an African-American artist affected Tanner and the art world’s response to his work. Born to a black bishop in the African Methodist Episcopalian Church and a former slave in 1859, Henry Ossawa Tanner grew up surrounded by high racial tensions in the wake of the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. After enduring racial strife in America for the first thirty two years of his life, Tanner decided he could not “fight prejudice and paint at the same time,” and left for Paris in 1891 to enroll in the Académie Julian (Brenson). Tanner indeed found that racial prejudices were less intense in Paris than in America, and that he could further establish himself as a painter in the French art school, where according to his own account he found “men of all nations and races… working earnestly and harmoniously with students of the Caucasian race” (qtd Skeel). Although Paris’ art community was comparatively accommodating, Tanner surely must have felt the rather unharmonious effects of racial prejudice among the general French population. As a Parisian reporter said in 1907, “It always gives me a chill to hear the French say ‘negre’… I believe that down in their hearts the French people despise black people” (qtd Mosby Across Continents 8). Despite being more progressive than Americans at the time, the French did not treat their African colonial subjects particularly well and probably did not have it in their hearts to warm up to an African-American artist. Tanner may have been welcome in the Parisian artistic subculture, but he probably could not completely escape the racial intolerance he experienced in America just by moving to France.
That said, Tanner did achieve great success in France as a painter of Christian subjects. He exhibited in the prestigious Paris Salon numerous times, and won praise from art critics on both sides of the Atlantic. Embedded within this praise, however, were still the trappings of racism by a Caucasian society that viewed an African-American painter as a novelty. The continuing racial remarks were particularly abundant in the American press, which refused to drop the issue of Tanner’s skin color, and often resorted to bizarre measures to tie his art to his race, as exemplified by the comments of a New York Evening Mail reviewer in 1908: “As a painter of religious subjects, Mr. Tanner is all the better for having a little of the Africa in his veins. Religious emotion is part and parcel of the life of the African” (qtd Boime 438-9). This claim that Tanner could paint religious themes with particular skill because of his racial background astounds logic, showing how frustrating and inescapable the issue of race was for Tanner. In America, it seems that Tanner had been labeled not only as a black artist, but also as a black Christian, and these labels clearly weakened Tanner’s sense of belonging: “Still deep down in my heart I love [America] and am sometimes sad that I cannot live where my heart is” (qtd Boime 418). Longing for acceptance, Tanner naturally felt saddened when thinking that he would never receive such acceptance from his homeland. Despite his renowned ability to convey Christian themes on a canvas, the issue of race could never drop in the Western world that Tanner knew.
Image:
Eakins, Thomas. Portrait of Henry O. Tanner, 1897. The Hyde Collection, Glen Falls, NY.