Henry Ossawa Tanner: Art, Faith, Race, and Legacy

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),...