Tanner, Henry Ossawa
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Tanner, Henry Ossawa

Sex:  Male

Born:  Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States
21 June 1859

Died:  Paris, France
25 May 1937

Activity/Profession:  Painter

5 articles on Tanner, Henry Ossawa

• Tanner, Henry O.

  Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1619-1895: From the Colonial Period to the Age of Frederick Douglass

  Word Count: 681      Includes:  Bibliography

  (b. 21 June 1859; d. 25 May 1937),
  artist of biblical and genre scenes and the first African American artist of international acclaim. Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on the eve of the Civil War. His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was an African Methodist Episcopal minister and bishop, an editor of the Christian Recorder, and a political activist. His mother, Sarah Tanner, was a former slave who had escaped via the Underground Railroad. When Tanner was young his family moved to Philadelphia, where his father became well known in the African American community for his promotion of racial uplift and equality. Bishop Tanner befriended Frederick Douglass—and occasionally opposed him. Through the Christian Recorder, Bishop Tanner both criticized and lauded Douglass's opinions on a ...
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• Tanner, Henry Ossawa

  Source: Encyclopedia of African American History, 1896 to the Present: From the Age of Segregation to the Twenty-first Century

  Word Count: 1051      Includes:  Bibliography

  (b. 21 June 1859; d. 25 May 1937), painter. Born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Henry Ossawa Tanner had a prominent family. His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a minister and, from 1888, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church; his mother, Sarah Tucker Tanner, a former slave, stressed education for her children, of whom Henry was the oldest. The family moved to Philadelphia in 1864.

  Tanner was a frail child and always had an interest in art. After seeing a painter working outside in the plein air style in Fairmont Park, Philadelphia, in 1872, Tanner decided to become an artist. His father did not fully support this decision, hoping to apprentice him to a flour mill. Nevertheless, he allowed his son to pursue his interests, and Henry entered the Pennsylvania Academy ...
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• Tanner, Henry Ossawa

  Source: Africana: The Encyclopedia of the African and African American Experience, Second Edition

  Word Count: 432      Includes:  Bibliography

  1859–1937
  American painter who was called “the first genius among Negro artists” by art historian James A. Porter. The son of a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. He was named after Osawatomie, the site of John Brown's antislavery raid in Kansas. Tanner began painting at the age of thirteen, and beginning in 1880 was a student at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied with Thomas Eakins, among others. Tanner taught at Clark College in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1889 to 1891, when he relocated to Paris, largely to escape racial prejudice in America. In Paris, Tanner took courses at the Académie Julien and, with the exception of two brief visits home in 18931896 ...
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• Tanner, Henry Ossawa

  Source: African American National Biography

  Word Count: 2092      Includes:  Further Reading | Obituary:

  (21 June 1859–25 May 1937), painter and draughtsman, was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, the son of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and editor of the Christian Recorder, and Sarah Miller. Tanner's parents were strong civil rights advocates; his middle name, Ossawa, was a tribute to the abolitionist John Brown of Osawatomie.

  The Tanner family moved in 1868 to Philadelphia, where Henry saw an artist at work in Fairmont Park and “decided on the spot” to become one. His mother encouraged this ambition although his father apprenticed him in the flour business after he graduated valedictorian of the Roberts Vaux Consolidated School for Colored Students in 1877. The latter work proved too strenuous for Tanner, and ...
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• Tanner, Henry Ossawa

  Source: Grove Art Online

  Word Count: 500      Includes:  Bibliography

  (b. Pittsburgh, 21 June 1859; d. Paris, 25 May 1937).

  American painter. He was one of the foremost African American artists, achieving an international reputation in the early years of the 20th century for his religious paintings. The son of an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, he studied art with Thomas Eakins from 1880 to 1882 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia. He then worked in Philadelphia and Atlanta, GA, where he ran a photography studio and taught at Clark College. He also exhibited in New York and Philadelphia and attracted several patrons who sponsored him to study abroad.

  In 1891 Tanner travelled to Paris, enrolling at the Académie Julian where he received instruction from Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens. He first exhibited his figure paintings at the

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