Henry Ossawa Tanner

This is our sixth Metro Journey, short and sweet.

Our first stop was the Town Hall Education Recreation Campus (THEARC).  Not only is THEARC a theater, but it also houses the Children's National Medical Center Clinic, the Levine school of Music,where I have been taking piano lessons for 6 years, Corcoran ArtReach, where I take art lessons, The Washington Charter School for Girls, and the FBR Branch of the Boys and Girls Club.  That's not all, but I didn't want to list everything.  It's about time they put an uplifting place like this in Southeast, DC.

Here we saw a play called When People Fly: Modern-Day Folk Tales of African American Heroes. Now I think this play was not age appropriate for us, but it was a good performance and another story I could share with my family.




The next stop was the Smithsonian American Art Museum. Here we were looking for art by Henry Ossawa Tanner.  When we arrived, the woman at the front desk did not even know his art was on display at the museum.  But when she pulled out her guide, she saw that it was actually thousands of pieces of his art there.  According to the Smithsonian American Art Museum website, "their collection captures the aspirations, character and imagination of the American people throughout three centuries. The museum is the home to one of the largest and most inclusive collections of American art in the world. Its artworks reveal key aspects of America's rich artistic and cultural history from the colonial period to today. More than 7,000 artists are represented in the collection."

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, on June 21, 1859, and unfortunately passed away May 25, 1937 in Paris, France. If you didn't know, Tanner's work was generally divided into two major periods: his Black genre period (up until about 1895), which addressed African-American themes, particularly teaching themes, and his biblical period themes, which dominated the rest of his professional life. Did you know that Ossawa, stems from Osawatomie, Kansas, where the abolitionist John Brown murdered five slave sympathizers in 1856? His father gave him that name.

This piece, called Head of the Jew in Palestine, was one of his pieces from the biblical period theme that we found at the museum.  Most of the artwork at the museum was from the teaching and biblical theme.  Unfortunately, the museum did not have any of his Black period theme of art.

My favorite piece from Tanner's collection was The Banjo Lesson. Tanner painted this in Philadelphia while he was recovering from typhoid fever that he had contracted in France. It was during this convalescence that Tanner decided to address African-American themes in his paintings. The Banjo lesson was purchased in 1894 by Hampton Institute, a historically Black college, after being shown at Earle's Gallery in my dad's home town "Philly." I liked this specific painting because it shows how we always helped family no matter what.  It showed a sense of love, respect, and care. Tanner attended Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, beginning in 1880.

Another one of his pieces "Christ Walking on Water," is also from the biblical theme.  Tanner's biblical themed-work was greatly influenced by his father.  His parents were cultured and educated, and they owned property. His father also was a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. Henry Ossawa Tanner decided he wanted to be a painter around the age of 12. Tanner started out to be a marine painter, painting various seascapes, harbor scenes, and ships in storms before being accepted at the Pennsylvania Academy in "Philly." Tanner was also interested in painting animals and made paintings and clay models of the animals at the Philadelphia Zoo.

Tanner painted The Thankful Poor in 1894.  It was his last painting in the Black period.  It is based on a similar painting called Le repas en famille, painted in 1891 by Elizabeth Nourse, a painter who was born in Cincinnati and also studied in France. "Both pictures quietly reassure the viewer that the souls of the exploited are perhaps the purest and their faith in God the strongest," according to the Contemporary Black Biography. The painting was exhibited for eleven years at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and then sold to the one and only Bill Cosby and his wife Camille Cosby in 1981 for $250,000.

 

Sorry, I had to take a detour with Mr. Tanner. It's so much information on him, it's crazy. So I stopped here at Fuddruckers. Chipotle, I hope we don't have any hard feelings. It's just that your line was too long so you know, A brotha gotta do, what a brotha gotta do. So I ended up getting a chicken sandwich with french fries. It was good though.

  Our last stop, now we are off to go home. Thanks Mrs. Anna for another short and really sweet MJ.