Henry Ossawa Tanner, Painter

In 1900, at the Universal Exposition in Paris, the world's great showcase of art and industry, a silver medal went to Daniel in the Lions' Den. Its painter, Henry Ossawa Tanner, was a Black American who had left his own country to be judged on his work rather than his color — and he had become the first Black painter to win international acclaim.

A Bishop's Son at the Academy

Tanner was born in Pittsburgh on June 21, 1859, and raised in Philadelphia, the son of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Sarah Miller Tanner, who had escaped slavery. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, one of the few Black students there.

Recognition in Paris

Racism shut doors to him at home. In 1891 he sailed for Paris, and there he found the recognition America withheld. Before he left for good, he painted The Banjo Lesson (1893), a tender portrait of an elderly Black man teaching a boy to play — a deliberate answer to the minstrel caricatures of the day. In France he turned to biblical subjects. Daniel in the Lions' Den earned honorable mention at the Paris Salon in 1896, and the French state purchased The Resurrection of Lazarus in 1897. The 1900 silver medal confirmed his standing among the leading painters of his era.

A Legacy that Opened Doors

Tanner lived in France until his death in 1937, but he remained a model and mentor for Black artists who came after him, many of whom made the trip to Paris to meet him. His success proved what white critics claimed impossible, and it opened a path that Harlem Renaissance artists would follow. The Banjo Lesson now hangs at Hampton University; in 1996 Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City became the first painting by a Black artist in the White House collection.