Here’s another great web-only interview by Jeffrey Brown of the PBS NewsHour. This one is with Anna O. Marley, curator of “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit,” now on exhibit at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.
The Banjo Lesson
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937) was one of the first major African American painters. He trained under Thomas Eakins, traveled to Jerusalem and Cairo, lived most of his adult life in Paris, and produced only a couple of pieces that depicted black life in the United States.
One of the best paintings hanging in the Telfair Academy rotunda here in Savannah is a landscape that Tanner painted the year he turned 21 — and about a decade before Tanner headed to Paris.
The Telfair's untitled painting by Henry Ossawa Tanner
The untitled marine scene at the Telfair (the museum also owns a study of an American soldier, but I don’t recall ever seeing it) was once owned by Zane Grey, the famed Western novelist, who was a friend of the Wanamaker family; Tanner’s Middle East travels were sponsored by Rodman Wanamaker, son of the founder of the famed department store.
