The Banjo Lesson by Henry Ossawa Tanner
Henry Ossawa Tanner, born in Pennsylvania to a former escaped slave and a Methodist minister, was the first African-American painter to gain international fame. Against his father’s wishes, Tanner spent a great deal of time teaching himself to paint as a young man, using art as therapy for his delicate health. In 1879 he was accepted into the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as the first African-American student and quickly rose to the top of his class, gaining special attention from his teachers. Throughout his education and advancement in the art world, the legacy of slavery haunted Tanner and he felt restricted by the color of his skin.
After time spent in Europe and the Northern United States, Tanner moved to Atlanta in 1888 where he opened a small gallery, sold photography and taught classes at Clark College. In Atlanta, he met two benefactors who supported him financially and that summer, he traveled up the mountain to Highlands to sell his photography, study and sketch the scenery, and regain his health in the cool mountain air. Though only on the Plateau one summer, it was clear from his later work that the area greatly impacted him. While in the mountains, Tanner created studies of nature used for several later landscapes and was exposed to rural African-American residents who were later used as subjects in some of his most important paintings.
The painting most surely inspired by his time in Highlands is Mountain Landscape, Highlands, North Carolina (c. 1889), based on water color sketches he made that summer, and, to a lesser extent, his most famous work, The Banjo Lesson (c. 1893), based on photographs he had taken of poor, rural African-Americans. Mountain Landscape reflects Tanner’s deep appreciation for the natural world he came face to face with while in Highlands. It is important to note in The Banjo Lesson, that the instrument depicted is the banjo, a greatly important instrument to the African American culture. In fact, the tender scene depicted of a man and grandson was his direct repudiation of the depiction of Black people in minstrel shows, popular at the time. In the end, these two works seem to summarize his formal education in Pennsylvania and Paris, his feelings of relative freedom in the restorative air of Highlands, and his artistic style before he moved to Paris, where he studied, painted and lived the rest of his life. He, too, was once captivated by the music and mountains so spectacularly found in Highlands.