Which African American painter spent much of his career in Europe where he countered demeaning images of blacks through works like The Banjo Lesson?

1 Contributions in Black Studies A Journal of African and Afro-American Studies Volume 9 Special Double Issue: African American Double Consciousness Article Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor Judith Wilson Follow this and additional works at: Recommended Citation Wilson, Judith (1992) "Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor," Contributions in Black Studies: Vol. 9, Article 4. Available at: This Article is brought to you for free and open access by the Afro-American Studies at Amherst. It has been accepted for inclusion in Contributions in Black Studies by an authorized administrator of Amherst. For more information, please contact

2 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Judith Wilson LIFTING "THE VEIL": HENRY O. TANNER'S THE BANJO LESSON AND THE THANKFUL POOR* ENRY O. TANNER'S 1893 painting, The Banjo Lesson, marks a turning point in African Americanart history. It was Tanner's first masterpiece, the first work in which he demonstrated his control ofa range oftechnical skills unmatched by any previousblackartist. Forwith Tannerwe havethe first Afro-Americansuitedfor greatness in the visual arts not only by talent and by temperament, but also by training. " Indeed his study with the eminent American realist, Thomas Eakins, at the period's leading art school, the PennsylvaniaAcademy offine Arts, provided him with the most advanced art education then available in the U.S.l And subsequently, when a nine-year struggle to surviveas an artist in his native land 2 was endedby a generous pairofpatrons who enabled him to go abroad, Tanner gained access to Europe's cultural resourcesan experience then considered indispensable, the final step in an American artist's training.t Thus, Tanner probably was the first U.S. Black fully equipped to succeed as a painter in the western tradition. But The Banjo Lesson was not only a crowning symbol of the century-old Afro American quest to obtain the skills, the sophistication and the financial support needed to attain real mastery as a fine artist. This canvas was also the site ofa profound psychic breakorbreak-through-adeclarationofafrican American self-esteem that anticipated the twin emphases on racial pride and vernacular culture which would come to characterize the work of numbers of Black artists only in the 20th century, beginning with the so-called Harlem Renaissance. Until recently, however, only a handful of authors have shownany recognitionofthis painting's epochal significance.t Howcould the ideological import of a canonical work of Afro-American art be underrated or The following essay is a much-revised version of a paper originally written for a Fall 1981 graduale seminar in the History of Art Department at Yale. Led by Professor Robert L. Herbert, the seminar focused on the treatment ofpeasant subject matterby the 19th-century Frenchrealist painters J. F. Millet and Gustave Courbet, in order to explore these artists' attitudes toward one of the major social transformations of their day: the shift from an economy based on rural agriculture to one increasingly dominated by urban industrialism. In choosing independent research projects, members ofthe seminar were permitted to look outside France and beyond the mid-19thcentury to examineotherartists whoseinvolvementwithpeasantthemes couldbe linked Published by Amherst, 1992 CONTRIBUTIONS in BLACK STUDIES, 9/10 ( ):

3 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson overlooked for so long? A glance at the initial reception of a pair ofkey works of mid 19th-century French art-paintings generically related to Tanner's masterpiece-is instructive.t. When Jean Francois Millet's The Sower and Gustave Courbet's The Burial at Omans appeared in the Paris Salon, the latter provoked a furor among contemporary critics, while their response to the former was relatively mild. Both canvases displayed the harsh realities of French provincial life with unprecendented candor. Butas Marxistarthistorian T. J. Clark has noted, where Courbet's audience was jarredas much by the innovative style ofhis image as by its subversivecontent, a veneer ofpastoral convention led mostviewers to overlook the radical implications ofmillet's art. 6 "[W]here the tradition survived, the critics saw the tradition more easily than its transformation," Clark concluded. A similarveil oftradition has concealedthe unorthodox natureofhenry O. Tanner's late 19th-centuryimageofAfro-Americans. As we shall see though, Tanner'sallegiance to accepted pictorial codes-to an anecdotal mode that could be traced to seventeenthcentury Dutch genre painting? and to a scientifically precise, but lyrically inflected realism-is neither the sole nor the most significant factor that has obscured his art's subversive import. Four years after Henry O. Tanner painted The Banjo Lesson, W. E. B. Du Bois outlined a cultural agenda that would provide the chief interpretative frame for Afro American art through much of our own century.f In order to assume their proper role on the world-historical stage, Du Bois declared, U.S. Blacks must assert themselves culturally, demonstrating"nota servile imitation ofanglo-saxon culture, buta stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals."? To this day, many commentators on the work of African American artists remain tangledin the inherentcontradictionsofthis nationalist-orientedprogram, strugglingto separate some fixed set of "Negro ideals" from an "Anglo-Saxon culture" they have conceptualizedin equallyahistoric, essentialistterms andexpecting"astalwartoriginality" to result from pursuit of such Sisyphusian efforts.l? to the French realist example. I decided to focus on Black America's best-known nineteenthcentury painter, Henry O. Tanner. In its present version, the original paper has been altered for the sake of clarity and in light ofnew data that has come to my attention. The underlying thesis, however, remains unchanged. In 1981, my principle sources for Tanner's life were Walter Augustus Simon, "Henry O. Tanner-Studyofthe Developmentofan American Negro Artist: ," unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, Fine Arts. New York University. 1961; Marcia M. Mathews, Henry Ossawa Tanner ( ), Chicago: University of Chicago Press. 1969; Hyde Collection, The Art ofhenry Ossawa Tanner ( ), Exhibition catalog, Glens Falls, N.Y. [1972]; Unsigned. "The Tanner Family,"TheNegroHistory Bulletin, vol. 10(April 1947), ,167;HenryO.Tanner, "The Story of an Artist's Life." The World's Work, vol. 18 (June 1909), , and (July 1909)

4 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting 'The Veil" 33 I. ASPECTS OF THE ARTIST'S EARLY life AND IDEOLOGICAL FORMATION Born on the eve of the Civil War, in 1859 in Pittsburgh, Henry O. Tanner was the eldest of seven children of Benjamin Tucker Tanner, a free-born "Pittsburger of three generations,"11and Sarah Elizabeth Miller. The granddaughter of a Virginia planter and a Black woman who presumably was his slave, the artist's mother had been born in bondagebutwas emancipateda year later, along with the rest of her family.12 The Millers subsequently headed North, settling in Pittsburgh in Atatime when perhapsas few as half of the one-tenthofblack Americans who were free managed to attain literacy,14 Benjamin Tanner and his bride possessed an unusual amount of formal education, which they endeavored to share with less fortunate members of their race. Having attended Pennsylvania's Avery College, Sarah Miller Tanner conducted a private school in her home.p Her husband, an Avery College graduate, had converted to Christianity in 1856 and joined the African Methodist Episcopal Church. He subsequently trained for the ministry at Western Theological Seminary and was ordained the year after his son Henry's birth.l 6 Thus, the future painter belonged to a small but crucially placed segment of mid 19th-century Black America. Northern-born and personallya stranger to the "peculiar institution," he is nonetheless apt to have felt strong ties to the Southern, ex-slave majority of his race, thanks to his mother'sfamily history. At the same time, a paternal legacy of longstanding freedom may have contributed an unusual degree of selfconfidenceand racial pride. And as the scion of educatedparents, he was automatically a member of the Black elite, a group that---especially after Emancipation-must have felt tremendous pressure to fill various psychic and social leadership roles. While it is likely that Henry O. Tanner'sconvictions stemmed from more than one source, there can be no doubt that his father providedan intimate model of ideological commitment. The intensity of the senior Tanner's feelings about racial injustice can be gauged by the fact that he gave his first-born the middle name "Ossawa." By awarding his son this unusual name, he apparently sought to register-in a discreetly oblique fashion-his approval ofthe controversial 1856 incidentnear Osawatomie, Kansas, in which the militant White abolitionist, John Brown, allegedly killed five pro-slavery men)? In his own contributions to his people's struggles-both before and after Emancipation-Benjamin Tanner seems to have focused on the intellectual and spiritual arenas, however. In 1861, he founded a school for newly emancipated Blacks in Washington, D.C. Five years later, he headed another freedmen's school, this time in Maryland. Meanwhile, having served as pastorto various congregationsin the District of Columbia and Maryland from 1859 to 1866, Tanner established his reputation as "a brilliant ecclesiatical scholar" with the publication of his first book, An Apology for African Methodism, in This, in tum, would lead to his election to the editorship of the A.M.E. Church's Philadelphia-basedorgan, The Christian Recorder, the following year.18 Dubbed "the greatest social institution of American Negroes" by W. E. B. Du Bois.t? the A.M.E. Church had stood for Black pride, self-help and self-determination Published by Amherst,

5 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson since its inception. Launched in 1794 with the dedication of Bethel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the seeds of the denomination had been planted in Philadelphia in 1787when a group of free Blacksrefused to accede to White demands that they occupy a separate section of a local church. During the nineteenth century, the AM.E. Church would playa central role in combatting segregation, promoting Black education and developing international ties between people of African descent.s? From the start, the church had put a premium on education, foundingits first school in 1798 and taking control of what would become the nation's oldest Black college, Wilberforce University, in By the turn of the century, the denomination could boast "a college in every Southernstate.''21 In its stresson education, though, the church tended to promote European-derivedcultural values, thus revealing an apparent contradiction.for itsrhetoricof Black self-esteemwasaccompaniedby revulsionforcertain traditional African practices. 22 Above all, church leaders were generally inclined to frown upon what theyheld to be the emotionalabandonassociatedwith African-derived styles of worship. The autobiography of Bishop Daniel Payne, the leading figure in AM.E. affairs throughout most of the second half of the 19thcentury and the man who directed much of Benjamin Tanner's pastoral career, contains an especially striking example of this aversion to traditionalblackreligious practices.payne's descriptionof the performance of a ring shout by participants in an 1878 "'bush meeting'" is unabashedly scornful: "After the sermon they formed a ring, and with coats off sung, clapped their hands and stamped their feet in a most ridiculous and heathenish way." Subsequently,he informed the group's leader that this mode worship was "disgraceful to themselves, the race, and the Christian name."23 Payne's words echo an earlier incident in which members of the AM.E. Church parent organization, the Philadelphia-based Free African Society, had condemned the revelry of their Bostoncounterpartsas "a shamefulpractice... thatenables our enemies to declare that we are not fit for freedom." Apparently Bishop Payne shared what historian Allen B. Ballard calls the Free African Society's "deep-seated antipathy... toward dance and song.''24 Benjamin Tucker Tanner had received his first pastoral assignment from Bishop Payne, whobecamea familyfriendandoneof hisartistson's firstpatrons.p BothPayne's views on Black worship(whichbenjamintanner is apt to have shared)and the A.M.E. emphasis on education beardirectly on the two examples of Henry O. Tanner's art that are the focus of this study. But while his father's church regarded certain Africanisms with a jaundiced eye, HenryO. Tanner is likely to have imbibed a counter-dose of pride in his African heritage from sources both at school and at home. The Robert Vaux School, from whichhe graduated, was Philadelphia's "first Black public school [staffed] with Black teachers." Its founder, Jacob White, Jr., had trained at the city's Institute for Colored Youth, the nation's first Black high schcol. Along with a rigorous program of classics, mathematics and science, the ICY offered an education informed by the presence in antebellum Philadelphia of three groups of highly politicized Blacks-veterans of the Haitian Revolution, the Underground Railroad and the abolition movement.white and other ICY graduatesare said to haveroutinely informed 4

6 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting "The Veil" 35 their pupils about such facets of Black history as "the greatness of Africa and the revolutionary heroism of Toussaint L 'Ouverture.''26 In addition to the influence of his teachers at the Vaux School, young Tanner had the exampleofhis father's workas an educatoroffreedmen anda religious leader whose churchhada longtraditionofsocialactivism.27 Afterservingas editorofthe Christian Recorder for sixteen years, Bejamin Tucker Tanner launched The A.M.E. Church Review, which he edited until his election to the bishopric in These national organs were key to the far-reaching influence of the A.M.E. Church: The Recorder, founded in 1847 as The Christian Herald was one ofthe few Black newspapers to span the antebellum through post-reconstruction eras; The Review, a quarterlyjournal,"was apparently the only national magazine published by blacks" when it began in Benjamin Tanner's stress on Black solidarity and economic self-reliance has led August Meier to count him among A.M.E. Church leaders with "proclivities toward radicalism.p? In a studyofthe church's social orientation during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, however, DavidWoodWillsfaults Meierfor over-simplifying Tanner's position.'! Wills sees Tanner as one of the church's "theological conservatives," deeply opposed to any theory or program involving "what seemed to him infidelity to Biblical truth"-such as evolutionism.v Yet he also lists Tanner as one of the threeleaders of the denomination he considers "most forceful and imaginative" in linking "theological reflection and social criticism.''33 At first glance, Benjamin Tanner's thinking seems rife with contradictions: Although an opponent of post-bellum African emigration schemes, Tanner favored limited colonization in order to accelerate the continent's conversion to Christianity.v' And while he advocated eventual elimination of the ethnic prefix from the A.M.E. Church name, he wasquick to deplore the use ofbiblical terminologyby White scholars that obscured the African identity of certain ancient civilizations.t> In matters of political economy too, Benjamin Tanner's views initially appear inconsistent. Disdainful of T. Thomas Fortune's socio-economic radicalism in the latter's 1884 Black and White: Land, Labor and Politics in the South, two years later Tannerhimselfwouldpenan editorialentitled"capitalandlabor" in which he lamented capitalistgreedand spoke favorably ofworkers' strikes. By 1887, however, the unions' practiceofracialexclusionand whathe viewedas their"excessive" demands had soured him on the labor movement.w Viewed in the context of A.M.E. history, however, the apparently conflicting stances of this Black ideologue and theologian gain coherence. Originally spawned by Philadelphia's Free African Society, from the start the church was committed to a program of racial uplift via industry, thrift and economic cooperation combined with moral and intellectual self-improvement.t? Yet, faced with the racism of their White Methodist brethren, the church's founders chose to create a separate denomination, instead ofrejecting Christianity altogether-achoice that suggests the degree to which these Blacks were committed to assimilation at the same time they proudly labeled themselves and their organizations "African" and opted for institutional autonomy. In other words, theirs was a strategic separatism-adignified and communally productive self-segregation in responseto the threatenedimpositionofa demeaningand inequitable Published by Amherst,

7 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson color bar. They did not embrace separatism as a social ideal, however. Indeed, their foremost 19th-century leader, Daniel Payne, is said to have "removed a minister at MotherBethelChurchwho refused to permita whitewoman tojoin the congregation."38 Benjamin Tanner's views on racial matters, then, exhibit a tension between assimilationist andblack nationalist ideals that was prevalent in his denomination from its beginnings through the second halfofthe 19th century. Indeed, one could argue that this dualistic stance was typical of late 19th-century Black ideology in general-s-or at leastof the thinking of the educated few whose views have mainly been recorded. It is not surprising, therefore, to find Bishop Tannerprivately and publically associated with both Booker T. Washington andw. E. B. Du Bois during this period.l? He was, for example,one ofadozenor so Blackeducators, intellectuals and political strategists, including Washington and Du Bois, who in 1897 founded the American Negro Academy-an organization that aimed to "promote publication of scholarly works," encourage"youthsofgenius," "establish an archive," aid in "the vindication of the Negro race," and publish an annual "designed to raise the standard of intellectual endeavor among American Negroes."4o In its stress on nurturing Black talent and vindicating the race, as well as its emphasis upon intellectualachievement, the Academy's goals seem congruent with the ideals of the A.M.E. Church. And Benjamin Tanner's involvement in an institution with such goals again suggests his son, Henry, was raised in a milieu in which education and social service were presumed to go hand-in-hand. Itis my contention that it was precisely this ideological climate that conditioned the younger Tanner to perform an unprecedented actofblack cultural self-assertion in the creationofhis two mostfamous canvases, The BanjoLesson and The Thankful Poor. But within a few years oftheir execution, these paintings' ideological significance would be obscured by a new train of thought set in motion by W. E. B. Du Bois. In his ''The Conservation ofraces," a paperdelivered to the American Negro Academyin 1897, Du Bois began to articulate a conscious form of Afro-American nationalism that differed markedly from earlier, largely expedient expressions of Black separatism. "The Conservation of Races" initiates Du Bois' prolonged grappling with the problem ofafro-american cultural identity-t-s-a project that would lead him to formulate the concept of"double-consciousness" in an essay dated that same year, a revised version of which became the first chapter of his 1903 masterpiece, The Souls ofblack Folk. 42 n. Du BOISIAN DOUBLE-CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE ART OF HENRY O. TANNER... ifin America it is to be proven... that not only are Negroes capable of evolving individual men like Toussaint the Saviour, but are a nation stored with wonderful possibilities of culture, then their destiny is not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals. -W. E. B. Du Bois, 'The Conservation of Races" (1897)43 6

8 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting "The Veil" 37 When W. E. B. Du Bois proclaimedthe AfricanAmericancreativemissionwas"not a servile imitation of Anglo-Saxon culture, but a stalwart originality which shall unswervingly follow Negro ideals," his words were conditioned by his own immersion in the veryculture he urgedfellow membersof the AmericanNegro Academytoeschew. Indeed, this call for independence from U.S. majority culture, echoed sentiments that were widespread among 19th-centuryEuropean and Euro-American artists.v' The impulse,on the one hand, tocreate a uniquely"american"artand,on theother, to celebrate "the common man" created a social agenda for 19th-century Euro-American art, the basic assumptions of which Du Bois shared. This is not to say, of course, that White Americans who concentrated on local genre, like William Sidney Mount or George CalebBingham, wereconcemedwithpromotingafro-americanculturalautonomy.nor that White Americans like William Morris Hunt, who returned from Europe with peasants on their minds, necessarily saw Blacks as the salt of the American soil. Du Bois' fusion of cultural nationalist sentiments with a nostalgic populist essentialismbecomes clearer when we turn from his remarks in "The Conservation of Races" to their amplification in the revised 1897 essay that constitutes the first chapter of The Souls ofblack Folk, "OfOur Spiritual Strivings." The essay opens with the author's well-known discussion of "double consciousness," a discussion Du Bois concludes by describing the alleged effects of this psychic split on the African American artist: The innate love of harmony and beauty that set the ruder souls ofhis people a-dancing and a-singingraisedbutconfusion and doubtin the soul ofthe black artist; for the beauty revealed to him was the soul-beauty ofa race which his larger audience despised, and he could not articulate the message of another people. 45 This hypothetical account of late 19th-centuryBlack artists' attitudes toward Black subjectmatter contrasts markedlywith the sentimentsof Henry O. Tanner, one of thefew late 19th-century Afro-American painters to actually make such "ruder souls" his subjects.w In an undated letter, probably written around 1893, the artist, referring to himself in the third person, explained: Since his return from Europe he has painted many Negro subjects, he feels drawn to such subjects on accountof the newness ofthe field and because of a desire to represent the serious and pathetic side oflife among them... To his mind many of the artists who have represented Negro life have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and affection for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.e? Judging by these remarks, Tanner seems not to have been afflicted with the cultural anguish posited by Du Bois. Rather than being daunted by White American disdain for Afro-Americanlife, the artist appears to have embraced the challenge of counteracting Whiteprejudices.The oppositionalcharacter of this self-appointedmission is the central point I want to make about The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor. But it would be unwiseto completely discount the possibility that "double consciousness" played a role Published by Amherst,

9 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson in the painter's thinking, given his subsequentabandonment of Blacksubject matter. As we shall see, the tensions Du Bois describedare embeddedin Tanner'stwo masterpieces of Black genre. But the degree of their presence suggests much less ambivalence than Du Bois attributed to African American artists. In "Of Our Spiritual Strivings," Du Bois not only diagnosed his race's spiritual malaise, but also prescribed anantidote: education-specifically the quest for literney-, he maintained, offered at least a partial solution to the problem of double consciousness. Describingthe ex-slave's struggleto sieze "thepowerofthe cabalisticlettersofthe white man" as an arduous journey, he claimed its rigors "changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect." Eventually, this phenomenological pilgrim: "... saw himself, ~kly as through a veil; and... [h]e began to have a dim feeling that, to attain his place in the world, he must be himself, and not another."48 For Tanner, too, based on the evidence provided by The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, educationplayeda centralrole in shapingblackselfhood. Significantly though, the two men focussed on different approaches to education. Du Bois's model, with its emphasis on "book-learning," is clearly that ofa European- derived, institutionalized pedagogy. Tanner, however, illustrates training processes that are domestic, informal, and,one guesses, more closely linkedto intragroup-asopposed to externallyimposed-c-traditions.e? ID. THE BANJO LESSON AND THE THANKFUL POOR In summer 1893 Tanner returned to Philadelphia from France in order to renew his funds and complete his recovery from typhoid fever. The Banjo Lessonprobably was painted at that time, and was first exhibited at a Philadelphia gallery in October Until recently, Tanner was thought to have based this composition on sketches he executed during an 1889 stay in North Carolina's Blue Ridge Mountains.t! Such sketches have never materialized, but a photograph of his models-which may have been shot in North Carolina-has been found. 52 The picture focuses upon two figures-a grey-haired man, who is seated, and a young boy, who stands between the older man's spread legs. The child plucks a banjo that looks nearly as tall as he is and seems to partially rest against the seated man's arm and leg. One of the child's legs is bent, as if he were either struggling to keep the instrumentin placeor perhapspatting a foot in time to the music he is attempting to make. He is assistedin his effortsby the adult, who fingers the banjo'suppermoststringswith his left hand, while the child fingers a lower group ofstrings within his own reach. The child peers down at the instrument, his lips pursed and his brow slightly furrowed in concentration, while the oldman cocks his heada bit to the side and down, wearing a look of bemused attention. It is a quietly affectionate scene, gently orchestrated by the play of shadows that centers on the dark-skinned pairand echoes-ina diagonal ascent-from the triangle of shadows surrounding a pair of vessels at the painting's lower right comer, to the dark cloth (or article of clothing) hanging on a wall at upper left. Both figures are in 8

10 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting "The Veil" 39 Henry Ossawa Tanner. TheBanjoLesson (1893), oil on canvas, x 35 1 /4 in. Hampton University Museum Collection. shirtsleeves. The boy's pants are rolled above his knees. Although the two's clothes look well-worn, the tatters and patches so often seen in eithersentimentalor derogatory, late 19th-century images of Blacks are conspicuously absent Similarly, their surroundings look humble, but don't suggest the most abjectforms of poverty: There is a wood plank floor, instead of mere dirt. Instead of unplaned, unpaintedtimber, the walls are whitewashed and plastered. There are even two small pictures of some kind, in frames against the rear wall. But the simplicity of this home is indicatedby what appears to be a skillet resting on the floor, which, along with a pile ofkindlingand the vessels in the foreground, suggests thepresence of an open hearth, probably the only cooking facility, nearby. The table setting in the background-with its rumpled cloth that does not entirely cover the tabletop, its bare white pitcher and a chunk ofbreadadds to the impression ofslender means. The Thankful Poor was painted in 1894: The man and boy in the second painting resemble the pair in the first, although here both are seen in profile. The table at which they are seatedis coveredby a whitecloth like the one in The BanjoLesson. The crockery placed on the tablealso resembles that in the earliercanvas. Thereare some differences, though. A latticedwindow with a whitecurtain coveringits lowerhalfcan be seen behind the grey-haired man at left. His chair is unlike either of the two chairs in the other picture,53whilethe boy here is seatedon what looks like a small bench or crate, neither of which appears in the other image. And although the man's dress seems to coincide with that of the man in the first painting, the boy in this picture wears a vest, while the * Unfortunately, the present owners of The ThankfulPoor would not permit a photographic reproduction of the painting to accompany the present article. Published by Amherst,

11 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson boy in the earlier canvas does not. The secondpainting shows man and boy with heads bowed in prayer over a meager repast. The two face one anotheracross a table coveredby worn and rumpledlinen. The man props his elbows on the table, clasps his hands togetherand presses a thumb against his forehead. His features are lost in shadow, but the boy's can be seen clearly. The child's eyes are closed and he touches his forehead with the side of one closed hand, while he grasps the table edge with the other, in a gesture that suggests his effort to emulate his elder's devotion is mixed with youthful eagerness to start the meal. The table setting is quite sparse: a pitcher, two small vessels-one lidded and one with a utensil stuck inside-that probably contain cream and sugar, a platter bearing a small quantityof meat. two rounds ofbreadthat rest directly on the tablecloth, two cups, two platesand two spoons. Aside from the old man's spoke-backedchair and the child's bench-likeseat. the curtainedwindow is the only otherfeature of the room visible. Thus, the information here is highly concentrated, permittingno distractions from the central image of youth and age, poverty and prayer. The BanjoLesson and The Thankful Poor illustratean interlocking set of arguments. The former debunks a widespread myth of innate Black musicality by showing the deliberate care with which a Black elder instructs a Black child in playing the banjo-- the central instrument of minstrelsy, the chief cultural form with which Blacks were identified and by which they were defined in the popular imagination in the post Reconstruction era. The latter counters an equallyprevalentcontemporaryperceptionof Black religiosity as overwhelmingly emotional-and thus, presumably inferior to an allegedly more tranquil, stable and introspective White brand of piety. 54 Both paintings address their themes on the level of private, rather than public practice, presenting domestic scenes in which the protagonists appear to be family members-possibly grandfatherand grandson.thus, in both instances the focus appears to be on individuals linked by biology and by social intimacy, making them perfect symbols of the competing claims of heredity versus socialization as explanations of Black cultural difference in late 19th-century America. Henry O. Tanner's views on the subject are conveyed by a grammar of poses and gestures that the artist deploys subtlely, yet persuasively. In both scenes, the protagonists' faces are turned down or away from the viewer; their eyes are averted. Man and boy concentrate on their respective activities. In The Banjo Lesson, we see the adult straining to hear and guide a child's efforts on the banjo, and the child struggling to master the stringed instrument In The Thankful Poor, we see the child's imperfect emulation of his elder'scompleteabsorption in prayer. Neitherimage presents anything like the unctious, approval-seeking, vacuous or irrepressibly sensual creatures of antebellum legend or post-bellum propaganda.p Both canvases invest their ordinary, underprivileged, Black subjects with a degree of dignity and self-possession that seemsextraordinary for the times in which they were painted. And perhapsmost remarkableof all is the artist'semotionalpoise, his successful avoidance of melodrama, exoticism, cloying sentimentality, excessive moralizing, triteness. But to late 20th-century eyes-which a long line of genuinely demeaning 10

12 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting "The Veil" 41 myths and correspondinglydemoralizingimages 56 have conditionedto read "passivity:' "impotence:'and/ordenial ofculturalidentityinto almostany scene in which the activity of Black males falls short ofarmed rebellion or suggests something less than complete rejection ofeuro-americanculture-the ideological significanceoftanner's eschewal of the psychic trappings of 19th-century anti-black stereotypes may not be readily apparent Thus, we must turn to the work ofhenry O. Tanner'spredecessorsin orderto further contextualize his accomplishment. IV. THEBLACKIMAGEIN 19TH-CENTURYAMERICANPAINTINGPRIOR TO THE BANJO LESSON AND THE THANKFUL POOR In the fine arts, 19th-century America produced not one, but two, painted records of its Blackpopulation-thatis to say, Afro-Americans' vision ofthemselvesand their compatriots' vision of them. Because these accounts differed markedly in quantity, characterand circumstancesofproduction,they will be examinedseparatelyat first, then compared with one another and fmally with Tanner's late 19th-century revision. Afro-American painting prior to Tanneris distinguished by three facts: 1) the free status ofits antebellum-era creators, 2) an apparent dearth of Black images'", and 3) a highly skewed representation of social class. These phenomena are not unrelated. Lacking the leisure, the educationalbackground, as well as the frequent exposureto fine art that enabled European aristocrats to become art patrons and connoisseurs, young America's merchants, shippers, industrialists and planters placed no high stakes on painting. Thus, a slave'sability to reproduce a likenessor sketch a scene would not have been valued, while the "more practical" skills of slave potters, carpenters, and seamstresses were both cultivated and rewarded. Hence, we have some surviving examples of slave craft and decorative artwork, but extant works of fine art-especially painting 58-by Black bondsmen and-women so far remain unknown. To the extent that the new nation's thrifty and pragmatic citizens supported nonutilitarian painting at all, their overwhelming preference was for portraiture. Among Blacks though, few ofeven those who were free could afford to commission a likeness of themselves. Thus, portraits ofprosperous Whites constitute the bulk of 19th-century images painted by Afro-Americans. The extant oeuvre of the earliest Black artist to whom a substantial body of work can be reliably attributed, Baltimore painter Joshua Johnson, amply demonstrates this. Ofthe 80-odd surviving, federal-period portraits by Johnson, only two depict Blacks.t? The questionofclass orientationin 19th-centuryart by African Americansis more complicated. During the second quarter of the 19th century, the American public's almost exclusive focus on portraiture began yielding to a growing interestin landscape and genre. By mid-century, Ohio artist Robert S. Duncanson, son of a free Black or mulatto woman and a Canadian man ofscottishdescent, was paintingwilderness scenes in the Hudson River School mode, along with portraits of various White abolitionist patrons. Only two Duncanson paintings that are known at present include Black subjects-hisc View ofcincinnati. Ohio. from Covington, Kentuckyand his 1853 Uncle Tom and Little Eva, the latter a commissioned work based on Harriet Beecher Stowe's controversial anti-slavery novel. 60 Published by Amherst,

13 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson Between Johnson's work in the century's first decades, and Duncanson's activity at mid-century, there is a scattering of portraits of Blacks by such figures as the New Orleanshomme de couleurjuleslion, BostonartistWilliam Simpsonand Philadelphia's A.B. Wilson. Together with the aforementioned canvases by Johnson and Duncanson, such works comprise a sparse roster ofblack faces painted by Afro-Americans prior to the Civil War. Given the slave status of the Black majority and the marginal economic condition ofmostantebellum-erafree Blacks,it is striking, to say the least, that the fictional houseslave in Duncanson's Uncle Tom and Little Eva and the Black couple in his View of Cincinnati. Ohio,from Covington. Kentucky are the only figures found among these paintings who appear to be eitherchattel(in the caseofuncletom) or unskilled laborers (in the caseof the Covingtoncouplej.s! Slavery and economic oppression were subjects a 19th-century Blackartist could hardly approach with equanimity and ones few Whites cared to see depicted unromantically. Here, the dearth of images belonging to certain categories probably indicates intensity of feeling, rather than indifference. In contrast to Duncanson's Uncle Tom or his Covington couple, Joshua Johnson's federal-era portraits include one that has been tentatively identified as Daniel Coker, a founderofwhatwouldbecomebaltimore'sfirsta.m.e. church,and a second, unknown, but equally distinguished-looking figure. 62 Similarly, the Black subjects depicted by Lion, Simpson andwilson are decidedly atypical figures-s-a member ofnew Orleans' mulatto elite,for example, or Blackchurch leaders like Jermain Loguen, an upstate New YorkA.M.E. bishopandformer fugitive slave who had becomean importantabolitionist orator.63 In keeping with these individuals' "exceptional"character, their poses, dress and surroundings (when indicated) convey extreme dignity and suggest some degree of social elevation. Thus, works like Johnson's Daniel Coker, Wilson's 1848 Bishop Daniel Payne and Familyor Simpson's 1864 BishopJermain Wesley Loguen employ various signals of bourgeois respectability-elegant but austere clothing, solemn expressions and static poses-to pay homage to Black moral and political authority figures, while Lion's remarkable Ashur Moses Nathan and Son, from c. 1845, pits signs of material prosperity-primarilythe subjects' carefullydetailedclothingand accessories-against the ethical bankruptcy ofa society that forced Whites like Nathan to conceal interracial unions that produced mulatto offspring like the youth with whom he is pictured.s" In celebrating African American achievement, advertising African American pride or exposingeuro-american hypocrisy, noneofthe 19th-century Black creators ofthese images questioned European-derived cultural norms or submitted African-derived alternatives, however. It is not simply thatthese artists painted in the prevailing Western styles of their day-an inevitability, given the absence of both an African heritage of portable, illusionistic painting and an African-American economic infrastructure capable of supporting an autonomous painting tradition. Rather, one is struck by the absence ofany representation ofcultural difference. It is as if, prior to Emancipation, Black artists dared not plead their people's cause in terms that were anything but flattering to Whites. The three-decade gap between slavery's end and the appearance of the next set of 12

14 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting "The Veil" 43 Afro-American images by Afro-American painters-such works as Henry O. Tanner's TheBanjoLesson (1893)and The ThankfulPoor(1894), and EdwardMitchellBannister's The Hay Gatherers (1893)65-suggests that a weighty coil of psychic and ideological shackles remained in place long after the last slave got word of her/his freedom. Even as the tum ofthecentury approached and Tannermanaged to depict African Americans in ways thatannounceda radicalbreakwith thepast, Bannister,an almostequally skilled painter, was unable to bring forth a comparably "emancipated" vision. A New England-based painter, Bannister, like Duncanson before him, is bestknown for his landscapes. The Hay Gatherers resembles Duncanson's View of Cincinnati... in that both works subordinate their human subjects to the surrounding landscape. For Duncanson, View ofcincinnati..., painted around the same time as his masterly Blue Hole. Flood Waters. Little Miami River (1851), apparently was a transitional pieee--an awkward blend of the Claudian theatricality he would deploy much more effectivelyafteran 1853 trip to Europeanda topographical objectivity drawn from his experience as a daguerreotypist and diorama painter. Here, unlike the less experimental, but more successful Blue Hole..., the artist's figures are unsatisfactorily integrated with their setting-a failure that probably contributes to the painting's thematic obscurity. Bannister, in contrast, so successfully melds his laborers into his moodily atmospheric, American Barbizon-style landscape that they are virtually indistinguishable from it. Despite the physical beauty of the resulting canvas and its evidence of Bannister's technical prowess, the view of Black America communicated by The Hay Gatherers seems romantic at best Represented as essentially elements of nature, Bannister's Black laborers can be seen as either emblems of pastoral nostalgia and longing for a cosmic unity ostensibly lost to modem, urban, industrialized humanity, or as signs ofclass or racial predisposition to humble, non-cerebral, "traditional" ways of life, in which "tradition" is presumed to be a fixed entity, miraculously immune to the dynamics of history. Itis precisely this latter, quiteperniciousassociation ofblacks with "nature"-and, by extension, with innate tendencies andan inexorablefate-as opposed to "culture" that is to say, with a sociallyconstructedand,therefore,constantlyshifting,changingand to somedegreechangeableweb ofconditionsandconsciousness-thathenryo. Tanner undermines in his Afro-American genre paintings. And in contrast to the majority ofhis predecessors, TannerdebunksBlackstereotypes withoutconfining himselfto images of a minisculeblackelite. 66 Butto see why a giftedyoung African American painter, armed with an acute sense ofcultural mission and a relatively advancedideological formation, would attack the particular set of myths he did at this time, we must now tum to 19thcentury White American images of Blacks. Where Black painters tended to make Black subjects the focus of portraits of specific individuals, Whites were far more apt to depict Blacks as either anonymous figures in groupscenes-e.g., the waitersin HenrySargent'sThe Dinner Party (c ), William SidneyMount'sCalifornia News (1850),or George Caleb Bingham'sThe County Election (I) (1851-2)-oras generic types-mount'sbanjo Player (1856), the contented slaves of Eastman Johnson's Negro Life at the South (a.k.a. Old Kentucky Published by Amherst,

15 Contributions in Black Studies, Vol. 9 [1992], Art Judith Wilson Home) (1859), or Winslow Homer's Cotton Pickers (1876). And where Blacks most oftenproducedimagesofafro-american achievement, showingthe race'sreligiousand socialleadersor membersoftheir families and investingthem with the prevailingsigns ofdignity and prosperity, when WhiteartistsdescribedBlackAmericans their economic and social status precipitously declined. With few exceptions (e.g., ThomasSully's 1864 portrait of Liberian president Daniel Dashiel Warner or the startlingly prosperouslooking Philadelphiafamily in Thomas Hovenden's 1888 TheirPride), when seen through Whiteeyes, Black America-freeor enslaved-becamea nation ofservants, musicians and rural laborers. Many of these images do not seem intentionally unflattering. Homer invested the pair ofyoung women in his Cotton Pickers, for example, with remarkable charm in one case (the left figure), and a positively subversive air ofsullen dignity in the other (the right figure). Clearly impoverished, these Black females nonetheless resist the easy imaginative access implied by such controlling or dismissive labels as "quaint," "pathetic," or "picturesque." Similarly, Mount's Banjo Player, far from conforming to the emasculating myths of minstrelsy, is the epitome of"gleaming youth," male vigor and effervescent charm. Spectacularly handsome and somewhat flamboyantly dressed by 19th-century middle-class White standards, he nonetheless looks neither pompous nor servile nor mindlessly sensual. Indeed, the improbable grimace of"darkle" caricatures is replaced by a brilliantly self-confident smile and humorous sidelong glance brimming with lively intelligence. There were paintings by 19th-century Whites, however, that depicted Blacks with evident disdain as charlatans, cowards, and buffoons-works like John Quidor's 1832 The Money Diggers, based on Washington Irving's Tales ofa Traveller, or Charles Deas' 1836 and Tompkins H. Matteson's 1857 The Turkey Shoots, both interpretations ofa scene from JamesFenimoreCooper's novel, The Pioneers (and, as such, reminders that racist stereotypes were widespread not only in visual art and on the minstrel stage, butin 19th-century American literature, as well). Above all, though, whether they meant well or ill, White artists generally pictured Blackspatronizingly-as perpetually goodhumored, peripheral or generalized figures, whose painted activities seldom threatened racist beliefs in the innate inferiority of people of African descent. Such portrayals tended to deny Blacks' intellectual or emotional complexity, stripping them of family ties, grouployaltiesor traditions.at the sametime, these imagesgenerallynegated Black psychic or social autonomy, denying the very possibility of an African American consciousness centered upon itself. 67 For Tanner, then, White American art offered no mirrors of his own experienceno images thattook into accountor accounted for the pragmatic separatism espoused by his father and other A.M.E. Church leaders, none thatreflectedboth the pride in African heritage he had learned at the Robert Vaux School and the fluency in Western culture ofsomeoneraisedin a household headed by a college-educatedminister who composed poemswith lengthy titles in Latin. 68 Nordid White images ofthe economically deprived Black masses ring true to the young Philadelphia artist who would observe that "many of the artists who have represented Negro life have only seen the... ludicrous side of it" and declare his own "desire to represent the serious, and pathetic side" instead. 14

16 Wilson: Lifting "The Veil": Henry O. Tanner's The Banjo Lesson and The Th Lifting 'The Veil" 45 CONCLUSION With The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, Henry O. Tanner lifted what Du Bois would call "the Veil of Race''69 to give art audiences an unprecedented "inside look" at Afro-American culture. We have seen that, in focusing upon ordinary, impoverished Blacks, these two paintings significantly depart from most previous images by African American artists. And we have seen that by according his subjects a dignity usually reserved for affluentwhites and "exceptional"peopleofcolor'", Tanner countered the patronizingor derogatorytendenciesofmost 19th-centuryWhiteAmerican portrayals of Blacks. Despite this marked break with convention, the polemical character of The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor has been obscuredby a profoundshift in Afro-American ideology, ofwhich Du Bois' turn-of-the-century writing was bothan early symptom and a catalyst. It is a shift that corresponds to the replacement of the pragmatic cultural nationalism ofa BenjaminTuckerTannerwith the programmatic nationalism ofdubois in his "Conservation ofraces." Whilethe latterwouldsubsequentlyclaim that "doubleconsciousness" made Black artists reluctantto celebrateblackvernacularculture,"! BishopTanner'seldestson had, in a c letter, indicated an eagerness to paint images that contested prevailing anti Black stereotypes. By making Black music and Black worship his subjects, Henry O. Tanner took aim at two of the period's most widespread and pernicious assumptions about Blacks: 1. that their obvious musical gifts were innate and, therefore, involuntary and incommensurate with White cultural achievements; 2. that their evident piety, instead of indicating moral elevation signified the opposite condition, being a mere outgrowth of an allegedly "superstitious" African past and a persistent inclination toward emotional excess. The former subject placed Tanner in direct competition with figures like William Sidney Mount, George Caleb Bingham and Eastman Johnson-the leading White American genre painters of the century-each ofwhom had linked Blacks to music in ways that now seem idealized, romantic. The latter pitted Tanner's image of a pair of impoverished Black males against images of Black religious leaders-such as G.W. Hobbs' 1785 pastelofam.e. ChurchfounderRichardAllen72; JoshuaJohnson's portrait ofbaltimore Methodist minister and future founder ofthat city's first Black Methodist church, Daniel Coker 73 ; AB. Wilson's 1840 portraitofphiladelphia's Bethel A.M.E. pastor John Comishl- and his 1848 Bishop Daniel Payne and Family, and William Simpson's 1864 portraitof Syracuse AM.E. bishop Jermain Loguen-images that inscribed Black dignity and pride in codes of an overwhelmingly bourgeois and Eurocentric character. In both instances, Tanner revealed a preoccupation with informal, domestic modes of education-whatwe might more accuratelycall "enculturation"-that,at first glance, betrays little ofthe cultural ambivalence Du Bois labels"doubleconsciousness." Yet we may detect a symptom of such identity conflict in Tanner's avoidance ofprecisely the more energetic, African-derivedstyleofworship that DanielPayneand otherfigures in the A.M.E. Church viewed with alarm. Published by Amherst,

Which editor of The Freeman helped to found the Afro American League in 1890 to agitate for black rights?

When the First World War began the Army's highest ranking African American officer was?

Which of the following statements about independent black filmmakers in the 1920s is least accurate?

Who popularized the genre of gospel music through compositions such as Precious Lord Take My Hand?