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| The Annunciation, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1898 |
What follows, then, is some of that—the spaces I find in which a definite knowledge of the man is missing. In the life of Henry Tanner, here are some of the ambiguities, the absences framed by opposing facts or unprovable speculation:
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Study for Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1899 |
Tanner’s mother, Sarah Miller Tanner, was a former slave. His middle name honored an event in the fight against slavery, the raid by the abolitionist John Brown on Osawatomie, Kansas. Tanner’s father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church who spoke against segregation. But Tanner the painter left this context behind. He went to Paris to live and work, beyond the reach of American slavery’s memory and legacy.
2. He was opposed in his art; he was encouraged in his art
The move to Paris was useful because of the obstacles to artistic acceptance Tanner would have faced at home. France’s climate was more racially tolerant than that of America. Yet his way wasn’t all obstacles; Tanner had tailwinds to his career that many an artist today would welcome. His parents recognized and encouraged his artistic promise. They enrolled him in the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts and honored his choice to pursue painting as his life’s work.
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The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water, Henry Ossawa Tanner, ca. 1907 |
Tanner was widely known as an African American artist, and by the end of the Harlem Renaissance period of the 1920s, he was held in such high regard that younger African American artists would travel to Paris for an audience with him. However, in a letter to art critic Eunice Tietjens, he took exception to her congratulating him as a “negro” artist, rejecting racial categorization by citing the known or likely mixed ancestry of his parents. Tanner wrote, “Now am I a Negro? Does not the 3/4 of English blood in my veins, which when it flowed in ‘pure’ Anglo-Saxon men and which has done in the past effective and distinguished work in the U.S.—does this not count for anything? Does the 1/4 or 1/8 of ‘pure’ Negro blood in my veins count for all?”
4. His motive in painting scenes from the Bible is unknown
Tanner devoted much of the full maturity of his artistic career to painting scenes from the Bible. The largest share of his finished works fits this category. Why? In his time, paintings portraying the Bible were in higher demand than paintings of contemporary scenes. With his upbringing, with the knowledge of the Bible he would have learned from his father, Tanner was well-equipped to answer this demand. Yet the indications seem to be that Tanner himself was a man of Christian humility, reverence, and faith. Did he experience his own work primarily as serving a market or primarily as his worshipful act of advancing the kingdom of God? He left no definite statement on this question. On one notable occasion he was asked whether he painted from the Bible in answer to his father’s hope that he would have been a minister. Tanner replied, “It is a pleasant story and I will not destroy it.”
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| Daniel in the Lions’ Den, Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1907-1918 |
Meanwhile, biography—even autobiography—is inherent construction. Or reduction. It is a shorthanding, a search for the most inclusive story that makes the largest number of exterior details fit. In contrast, the artist searches the interior, finding the current of truth there and hoping to ride this current past the context of any exterior details so as to convey meaning into other contexts, other lives. Tanner left us his work because it’s what he wanted to leave us. And he left few autobiographical statements because, I suspect, he would have considered these statements to be extraneous or incomplete by comparison.
[PS. One more fact worth sharing, though it didn’t fit into the piece above: Henry Tanner might not have been the most accomplished member of his family. His sister, Halle Tanner Johnson, was the first female doctor in Alabama.]