19th CenturyAfrican American

Artists

Joshua Johnson• Son of a white man and black slave

woman in Baltimore, Maryland

• Father purchased him at age 19 in

1764

• Released on condition that he learned

a trade (painting)

• Manumission was signed by Colonel

John Moale, who Johnson would paint

• Learned to paint in a popular “folk”

style

• Left: Grace Allison McCurdy and Her

Daughters, ca. 1806. Corcoran Gallery

of Art

Joshua Johnson

Mrs. John Moale (Ellin North) and Ellin North Moale, ca. 1798.The Abby Aldrich Rockefeller Folk Art Museum

Robert S. Duncanson

• Born free in 1821 in Fayette,

New York

• Family members were skilled

house and sign painters

• Moved to Cincinnati to

“make it” as a fine artist

• Abolitionists supported his

painting landscapes

Robert S. Duncanson

Robert S. Duncanson, View of Cincinnati, Ohio from Covington, Kentucky, 1851. Cincinnati Historical Society.

Robert S. Duncanson

Frederick Church, Heart of the Andes, 1859. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Robert S. Duncanson

Robert S. Duncanson, Land of the Lotus Eaters, 1861. Royal Court of Sweden.

Robert S. Duncanson

Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1853. Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Grafton Tyler Brown• First African American to chronicle the

West

• Born 1841 in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania

• Trained as a printer in Philadelphia

• Moved to San Francisco around beginning

of Civil War

• Travelled and chronicled the West as

printer and mapmaker

• Painted landscapes in mid-1880s and

‘90s

Robert S. Duncanson, Uncle Tom and Little Eva, 1853. Detroit Institute of the Arts.

Grafton Tyler Brown, Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone from Hayden Point, 1891. Oakland Museum.

Grafton Tyler Brown, Old Faithful Geyser, Yellowstone National Park, 1887. Stark Museum of Art.

Edward Mitchell Bannister• Born 1827/1828 in New Brunswick, Canada

• Self-taught as painter

• Moved to Boston and worked in New England

• In touch with contemporary art and poetry

• Influenced by Barbizon School

• Renowned for romantic rural scenes

• Won first-prize at the Philadelphia Centennial

Exposition of 1876

• Founded Providence Art Club in 1878

Edward Mitchell Bannister, Approaching Storm, 1886. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Edward Mitchell Bannister, Driving Home the Cows, 1881. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Jean-Francoise Millet, The Angelus, 1857-9. Musee d’Ordsay, Paris.

Edward Mitchell Bannister, Landscape Near Newport, R.I., 1877. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Edward Mitchell Bannister, Newspaper Boy, 1869. Smithsonian American Art Museum.

Edmonia Lewis• Born 1844 in Greenbush, New York

from Hatian and Native American

parents

• Went to school at Oberlin

• Achieved fame with portraits of anti-

slavery heroes like John Brown and

Colonel Shaw

• First African American sculptor to

achieve international recognition

• Moved to Rome in 1866

Edmonia Lewis, John Brown, 1878.

Edmonia Lewis, Robert Gould Shaw, 1866-7.

Edmonia Lewis, Forever Free, 1866. Howard University Gallery of Art.

• Sculpted after the Civil War

• Classical sculpture in marble

at a big scale taking on the

subject of African American

experience

• Tackling formal problems of

two figures in one work

• Possible allusion to women’s

liberation

Neo-classicism

• A style inspired by

ancient Greek and

Roman models

• 18th and 19th

Century emphasis

on enlightenment,

reason and civic

life

Horatio Greenough, George Washington, 1840. National Museum of American History.

Edmonia Lewis, Hiawatha, 1866-7. Edmonia Lewis, The Wooing of Hiawatha, 1866.

Edmonia Lewis, The Death of Cleopatra, 1876. National Museum of American Art.

William Wetmore Story, Cleopatra, 1869. Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner• Born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1859

• Mother had escaped slavery through

Underground Railroad

• Learned drawing and painting from life by

Thomas Eakins at Pennsylvania Academy

• Painted genre scenes of family life

• Moved to France in 1891

• Began painting Biblical scenes

• First African American elected to National

Academy

Henry O. Tanner, The Banjo Lesson, 1893. Hampton University Art Collection.

Henry O. Tanner, The Thankful Poor, 1894. Collection of William H. and Camille Cosby. 

Henry O. Tanner, The Resurrection of Lazarus, 1896. Musee d’Orsay. 

Into the 20th CenturyOur Negro American painter of outstanding success is Henry O.

Tanner. His career is a case in point. Though a professed painter of

types, he has devoted his art talent mainly to the portrayal of Jewish

Biblical types and subjects, and has never maturely touched the

portrayal of the Negro subject. . . . We ought and must have a school

of Negro art, a local and a racially representative tradition. And that

we have not, explains why the generation of Negro artists succeeding

Mr. Tanner had only the inspiration of his great success to fire their

ambitions, but not the guidance of a distinctive tradition to focus and

direct their talents.

Alain Locke, “The Legacy of the Ancestral Arts” (1925)