Word: tanner
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...works on view vary widely in quality. Particularly in Tanner's later years, when he was living in Paris without being able to sell much work, many of his paintings were second-rate. Yet at his best, he was a draftsman of great ability, a recorder of daily life with understanding and warmth, a religious painter with gifts considerably exceeding those of a mere illustrator...
...fact that Tanner was able to make a career in a sphere that had known virtually no Negroes marked him as a man of exceptional drive. He was also more fortunate in family background and education than were most U.S. Negroes of the period. Born in 1859, the son of an African Methodist minister, the artist was raised in Philadelphia and attended high school. He became entranced with painting at the age of twelve when he saw a landscapist at work during an outing with his father in Fairmount Park...
...Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he studied between 1880 and 1882 under Thomas Eakins, who helped turn him from landscapes to genre scenes. The Banjo Lesson, done in about 1893, is typical in its unsentimental, robust honesty. Tanner's first one-man show, in Cincinnati, failed to sell a single picture to the public. He sailed in 1891 for Paris, where he must have seemed rather prim to the rowdy French art students who studied with him at the Academie Julien. Thanks to his Methodist upbringing, Tanner refused to touch wine at first...
Serene Moonlight. In painting as in manners, Tanner was a conservative. Nonetheless, he enjoyed a remarkable popular success. Soon after he arrived in Paris, he began to paint Biblical subjects in Oriental settings. Executed with sinuous vigor of line and a dramatic use of chiaroscuro, these pictures had much in common stylistically with Edouard Vuillard and Art Nouveau. When Daniel in the Lion's Den was shown in the Paris Salon in 1896, the famous French history painter Jean-Leon Gerome insisted that it be given a place of honor. When the Raising of Lazarus was shown...
...years before World War I, Tanner developed a special technique of applying his paint in thin, linseed-oil glazes. He began employing a gemlike palette heavily laced with blues and aquamarines. Many of the works done in this later style have cracked and flaked. But some few among them-notably the serenely moonlit Abraham's Oak -still show how Tanner could take a simple Biblical tale and use it to inspire a unique poetic vision...