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Writer's pictureJoseph R. Goodall

Things I See and Believe: Henry Ossawa Tanner's Art and Inspiration

Updated: Nov 9


Flight into Egypt painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner
"Flight into Egypt" (1899), by Henry Ossawa Tanner

As a child, I painted landscape scenes I had never laid eyes on, recreations of Monet’s lily pads floating in a French pond, a world and century removed from my turn-of-the-millennium Florida classroom. While memorable and intriguing, the allure may have been childlike and surface-level, a desire to imitate, an urge to be seen and appreciated. But something in those paint splotches called to me. I just needed more guideposts to understand their language—to learn it extended beyond painting and was meant to be expressed in my own way, too.


The list of famous artists in my elementary school art teacher’s curriculum was limited, but I’m thankful for how she introduced us to their work by letting us try our hand at their craft. One year, she projected a Claude Monet painting onto a white cinderblock wall. I donned a flimsy plastic apron alongside my classmates and applied thick globs of bright paint to paper, each creating our own version of the Impressionist master’s water lilies. I still recall the tone of the painting and can picture the tall, vertical format, the blend of light and shadows reflected in the surface of the pond, the weeping willow trees and small, turquoise bridge in the manicured Giverny garden. I was fascinated by how the vibrant, jagged brush strokes conveyed a full, dynamic image that seemed to contain its own shimmering light source.


Later that month, our artwork was displayed at the local library. I scanned for my name on a wall filled with erratic streaks of blue, white and green. Almost every one contained the same general shapes of the arch over the pond, a patchwork of variations on the same tranquil scene, which a hundred years earlier had caught the eye and imagination of a bearded old man. Though I couldn’t articulate it then, the swirling colors and patterns moved my spirit. But toward what? 


I went on to write a research paper about the painter as a college freshman. Monet and his contemporaries were depicting the world in a new way, drawing attention to the ever-changing hues of light and shadow, employing blends of chaotic color to communicate the general impression of a landscape, or other subject, at a particular moment and angle. Monet’s series of lily pad paintings—roughly 250 in total—convey the same vantage point at different times of day and in different seasons throughout the year. Though I didn’t continue painting as I grew older, I wonder now if I was drawn toward the hazy lily pads themselves, or instead the question of why the artist chose that particular setting and what beckoned him to return to it again and again.


Christ and His Disciples on the Sea of Galilee (1910), by Henry Ossawa Tanner

More recently, I’ve been caught between feeling overwhelming responsibility and anxious resignation over how to engage with the world, to discern my place within all its gloriously moving and complexly hurting parts. It’s high-minded and existential, yet a sincere line of questioning: how to steward my time, attention, emotions, relationships and resources. I find myself wondering how to translate these thoughts into something helpful and constructive—and maybe even beautiful?

A couple months ago, my pastor extended an invitation for hand-made art to decorate the cinderblock walls of our church building. Over the last few years I’d been developing my crochet skills with practical projects like blankets and hats. I figured maybe this was a chance to make something more free-form—a way to creatively externalize my discontent. Naturally, I went looking for inspiration. Rather than sticking to the household names, I came across a lesser-known contemporary of Monet, Henry Ossawa Tanner. While his meditative, calming painting style captured my attention, it was his thoughtful, courageous response to prejudice and dedication to family and community that earned my admiration and stirred my imagination. The first African American artist to gain international acclaim, in many ways Tanner had to blaze his own career path. As I discovered, the repeated themes of his art and life journey align in an inspirational way, like an invitation to join a conversation which, as Tanner wrote, “makes the whole world kin.”


The first of Henry Ossawa Tanner’s paintings I came across was on a Wikipedia page about religious art. It was dark, somber, yet soulful—a moon-lit scene of Jesus’s disciples floundering in a boat on the Sea of Galilee. Heavy blues, bleeding into gray, the deep purple of night, the severe curve of the boat threatening to succumb to the waves. Something about it was too mysterious, too scary, too surreal to be divine. And yet it felt lived-in, open-handed, messy yet relatable. The exact place where a miracle would be welcome. Thinking back on my initial reaction to this painting, I can feel my mind and body relax, reminded I am not the only one accustomed to feeling overwhelmed, disoriented, lost. 


Another one of Tanner’s paintings I found online depicts an orange grove in the Florida sunshine: a low, cloud-streaked horizon beyond lush trees laden with bright orbs. The scene transported me, as if in it Tanner was both recounting the particular sensation from my childhood of staring up at the citrus trees beside my parent’s house, and at the same time conveying the saturated, linear power of Floridian landscapes that defies description.

Intrigued, I searched for books about Tanner and found very few results. One of the only volumes on his life and work (Henry Ossawa Tanner, by Darrel Sewell, Dewey F. Mosby and Rae Alexander-Minter), an overview of a traveling exhibition from the 1990s, happened to be available at my library. By the time I got my hands on it, I had scanned through all his known paintings online, gaining a sense of his style but hungry to learn about his upbringing, development and motivation.


Florida (1894), by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburg in 1859, just before the outbreak of the Civil War. His parents named their first child after the Battle of Osawatomie, where abolitionist John Brown confronted a violent band of raiders who had killed his son and threatened to burn down their anti-slavery community. Tanner’s father was a newsletter publisher and lifelong minister in the African Methodist Episcopal church. His mother, a teacher, was born into slavery and had escaped north to Pennsylvania via the Underground Railroad’s discreet network of safehouses and sympathizers. 


While his parents were politically active and dedicated to advancing the wellbeing of black people following the Emancipation Proclamation, the young Tanner experienced health challenges and wasn’t particularly drawn to becoming a businessman or minister. Instead, he was inspired to paint, though there were no artists in his family and very few in his social circle. The story goes that thirteen-year-old Tanner encountered a man painting a portrait of a tree while walking through Fairmount Park with his father. Seeing the artist translate what he saw onto the canvas kindled Tanner’s desire to express himself through art.


As a teenager he began to paint foreboding scenes of boats and crashing waves, and he regularly studied portraits hung in gallery windows downtown. Through visits to upstate New York, he also experimented with painting dense forests and woodland creatures, as well as zoo animals and people bustling through busy streets. He aimed high: dreaming of becoming America’s first great maritime painter, or perhaps a celebrated landscape artist.


When his father’s idea of working a more traditional job did not pan out, Tanner convinced his parents to let him try painting full time. While his father resisted at first, later on Bishop Tanner recognized the power of his son’s art to deliver messages as powerfully as a sermon. As for Mrs. Tanner, she eventually lived on in an evocative portrait similar to Whistler’s Mother. But when Henry was first starting out as an aspiring black artist in the late 19th century, it was challenging to find willing teachers or a school in which to build his skills and reputation. Eventually he was able to enroll at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, becoming its only black student. He studied under Thomas Eakins, who valued realism, painting live models and capturing natural scenes as viewed directly by the artist rather than copying past works of art. 


Tanner applied himself diligently to his training, but his ambitions and skills were thwarted by people who could not imagine or tolerate the idea of someone who looked like him becoming a respected artist. When Tanner tried to submit work to galleries and shows, he was often relegated to Negro-only collections or considered a second-class painter. Once, he was assaulted by his classmate Joseph Pennell and others, tied to an easel and left out in the street overnight.


However, it was Tanner’s friends and trusted colleagues who buoyed his spirits and encouraged him to press on. After intense periods of focused work, he often became sick. At these times he retreated to the mountains of North Carolina or traveled with his father to Florida for a church conference. Almost everywhere he went, even in recovery, he painted. However, he seemed to be restless, having difficulty finding momentum and a welcoming space for his art. When he moved to Atlanta to open a photography studio, the Hartzell family supported his painting career, buying his paintings so Tanner could afford to move to Europe in 1891 to further his creative endeavors.


Though he initially set out for Rome, Tanner stopped in Paris and ended up calling it home for much of the rest of his life. A friend from Atlanta helped him enroll in a school and find local connections. He was relieved to not face the same prejudice in Europe. Throughout the next decade he honed his skills, developing his own personal style, influenced by his teachers and the symbolist movement. However, he did not copy famous paintings from the Louvre, like other contemporary artists who sought to mimic the style of older masters. Certainly, the influence of his upbringing and parents also came through his art.


When Tanner’s painting of Daniel in the Lion’s Den received praise from French critics, a patron funded a trip to the Levant so Tanner could visit the Holy Land and glean from seeing the vistas and culture with his own eyes. This trip influenced the rest of his career, lending an authenticity to the people, settings and themes he repeatedly depicted in biblical scenes. 


Tanner married Jessie Olssen, a Swiss-American opera singer, and they had a son together. Eventually, some of Henry’s paintings were purchased by the French government, and he was recognized by the European art world. Several American art institutions appointed him to positions of influence in his later years. While not warmly received by the more avant-garde African American art scene of the Harlem Renaissance of the 1920s, he was still visited by many aspiring black artists in Paris. He volunteered with the Red Cross during the First World War, driving ambulances and painting images of black troops and the war-torn European countryside. 


In his last years, he mourned the death of his parents and his wife, and tried to stay close to his son. He revisited the same scenes in his artwork with increasing frequency, showing reverent attention to motion and color using careful brush strokes. Particularly interesting to me are his depictions of Jesus’s parable of the Good Shepherd and Mary and Joseph’s evacuation to Egypt when their lives were threatened after Jesus’s birth. But how Tanner migrated toward revisiting the same biblical imagery is closely intertwined with his entire life story.


Near the beginning of his career, Tanner tried to paint several genre scenes of African American people. Counteracting the harsh and crude stereotypes of popular culture, he instead conveyed the piety, musicality, craftsmanship and close familial ties Tanner knew from personal experience. While he received some critical praise in Europe and the US for a couple of these paintings, such as The Thankful Poor, Tanner still wrestled with how to best use his talents. On trips home to America, he was no doubt influenced by his sister, the first female physician in Alabama, his father, who continued to serve his church community and speak out against inequities, and leaders such as Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

But rather than devoting more focus to American subjects, Tanner doubled down on religious imagery, painting scenes from the Bible stories he heard in his father’s sermons and read many times himself. These are not bright, triumphant masterpieces with cherubim and halos, patronized by monarchs or popes. They are humble and realistic, personal yet relatable, emblematic not only of the symbolist art movement in France but also of Tanner’s faith. Tanner’s son Jesse said his father’s artwork was meant to help viewers adopt a “receptive state of mind” and to develop communion with God.


The Good Shepherd (1902), by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Tanner’s paintings are serene yet moody, tactile yet ethereal, impressionistic yet earth-bound. His biblical scenes are fascinating to me because while not real-time landscape paintings, they are forged by his trips to Israel, Palestine and the Middle East, his time spent meditating on these ancient stories and the spiritual influence they held on his own life. The wispy, painted trees near a flock of wandering sheep match the trees he once saw on a hillside near Jerusalem. The dappled brushstrokes conveying the moon’s eerie glow recreate a night he walked along the sea of Galilee.


The multiple iterations of the kind, strong man searching after the one sheep missing from his flock had to have been part of Tanner’s personal identity. The image of the young family of refugees, fleeing to safety with their prophesied son, is layered with meaning from Henry’s own life: his health retreats in the Appalachians and the Gulf of Mexico, his mother’s stories about escaping from bondage in Virginia, his boat rides across the Atlantic between America and Europe, the harrowing night he was mocked and tied to an easel, the moments of recognition and increasing fame he gained in places he had once been shunned or ridiculed.


Revisiting a familiar story, cultural tradition or geographic place is integral to the human experience. When imbued with fresh breath by our own viewpoint and experience, it can become a way to cope, to interpret, to heal, to leave behind a trail of hope and encouragement. I got the sense Tanner’s many “versions” of his paintings weren’t meant to perfect an image or mimic a certain style. Instead, they were his unique way of mining the troves of Scripture’s power displayed in meekness, telling truths essential to his own life and to humanity in general in a way you might “feel” rather than merely “see.” Instead of trying to impress viewers or call attention to himself, Tanner was exploring ideas so stuck in his imagination they had become like a mother tongue used to call home, to recenter himself and reconnect with the story of how he came to be and where he was ultimately headed.


While he demonstrated his love for the multiple places he called home, he was not wholeheartedly accepted everywhere—from his ethnicity, to his religion, to his style of art. But even still, in his search for belonging he continued to make art. 


Through reflecting on Henry’s work and my own ruminations, I decided to interpret the biblical creation narrative for my crochet project. The wall hanging became a visual translation of the sweeping origin story at the beginning of the Hebrew Bible, where God hovers over the world like a roosting bird as God steadily gives birth to all creation—from light and land to water, sky, plants, animals and humans. The tapestry combines a variety of yarn sizes, materials, stitch patterns and vibrant earth tones into a diverse yet interconnected miniature landscape. The colorful rows allude to the orderly differentiation of creation, while the lumpy, misshapen form mirrors the unfinished, ongoing evolution in the universe and in our communal and individual lives.


The Spirit Hovered Over the Earth (2024), by Joseph R. Goodall

While I wished I’d learned about Henry Ossawa Tanner alongside Claude Monet and his lily pads, encountering Tanner’s work in this season of my life has been shaping my creative process to be more personal, meaningful and authentic. Perhaps there was something innate about my childlike desire to be recognized and appreciated as I tried to copy Monet’s subject. I think that is a hallmark of basic human dignity.


But Tanner’s life and art also encouraged me to consider how I look beyond myself and reflect back my own surroundings, as well as the stories and traditions I’ve inherited. His commitment to family, friends and his own well-being heightened my curiosity about how we develop our creative interests, thoughtfully iterate them, and courageously share them with our community for our common benefit. 


“I paint the things I see and believe…I have chosen the character of my art because it conveys my message and tells what I want to tell my own generation and leave to the future.”
 - Henry Ossawa Tanner

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