One was called “the best landscape painter in the West.” Another was given France’s highest civilian honor and saw his work enter into some of Paris’s most prestigious museums. A U.S. president visited yet another in her studio—and sat for a sculpture.
Amazingly, in the years before, during and after the Civil War—an era when Black people faced scant opportunities, diminished expectations and routine racial violence, both within the institution of slavery and outside of it—several African American artists achieved success and even celebrity. They acquired collectors and patrons, institutional acclaim and major profits, all in their lifetimes.
These artists worked across different mediums and tackled different themes. Some of them stayed stateside while others dazzled the salons of Europe. Despite being marginalized by racism, each of these five trailblazing figures—Edmonia Lewis, Henry Ossawa Tanner, May Howard Jackson, Robert Seldon Duncanson and Edward Mitchell Bannister—carved a path towards artistic greatness.
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1. Edmonia Lewis (1844-1907)
Born free in upstate New York in 1844 to a Haitian father and part-Chippewa mother, Edmonia Lewis became the first Black and Native American artist to achieve international recognition for her ravishing neoclassical sculptures.
After studying at Oberlin College (where she was the victim of a racist attack), Lewis began her career in Boston making clay and plaster medallions of abolitionists including John Brown and William Lloyd Garrison. Financed by the sale of these commemorative medallions, as well as a particularly successful bust of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the first all-Black military regiment, Lewis traveled to Europe and eventually settled in Rome.
Lewis received significant acclaim and commissions in the Eternal City—a guidebook at the time designated her as one of “the most celebrated artists of Rome.” Despite looser attitudes around race and gender in Europe, her status as “Afro-Indian” likely contributed to the attention that her work attracted, according to Naurice Frank Woods, a professor of African American studies at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and the author of several books on 19th-century art.
“Those venturing to her studio in Rome, particularly Americans on the Grand Tour, undoubtedly took note of a woman of color transforming white marble into magnificent works of art,” says Woods.
Visitors to her studio included Frederick Douglass and former U.S. president Ulysses S. Grant, who sat for a bust in 1877. By the 1880s, neoclassicism had largely fallen out of favor, and Lewis's later years were spent in obscurity. She died in London in 1907.
2. Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937)
A child of Pennsylvania who eventually made Paris his home, Henry Ossawa Tanner became a celebrity artist in both France and the United States. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh in 1859; his father was a minister and his mother had escaped slavery through the Underground Railroad. As a teenager, Tanner was inspired to become an artist after seeing a plein-air painter at work in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park. In 1880, he enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts—the nation’s first art school—and studied under naturalist painter Thomas Eakins.
With the help of a patron from the Methodist church, Tanner traveled abroad to Paris and continued his training at the Académie Julian. Though early in his career Tanner was drawn to African American subjects, he primarily became known as a painter of Christian themes.
“I believe he turned to religious painting because of his religious upbringing, his deep faith, as well as the market for modern religious painting in the U.S. and France at the turn of the twentieth century,” says Anna O. Marley, an art historian and the chief of curatorial affairs at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Tanner lived and worked in France until his death in 1937. Despite the significant prestige that he enjoyed there—his lushly rendered oil paintings won medals at several of the annual Paris Salons, and in 1923 he was made an honorary chevalier of the Order of the Legion of Honor, the French government’s highest honor—his work garnered a different reaction in America. Critics in the United States fixated on his race, while in Paris, says Marley, Tanner was simply “Monsieur Tanner, artiste Americain.”
3. May Howard Jackson (1877-1931)
Although she did not achieve the same level of mainstream success as Lewis or Tanner, May Howard Jackson is remembered today for unsparingly tackling racial identity in her work. Born to a well-off Philadelphia family in 1877, Jackson gained exposure to art from an early age: she attended the progressive J. Liberty Tadd’s Art High School and, like Tanner, enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, becoming the first African American woman to attend school there.
Unlike many of her peers, Jackson did not travel to Europe after graduating. Instead, she maintained studios in both New York and Washington, D.C. and taught at Howard University, becoming a mentor and instructor to other Black artists. Jackson gained particular acclaim for her busts of African American luminaries including the poet Paul Laurence Dunbar and W.E.B. Du Bois, but also regularly depicted Black and mixed-race friends, family members and anonymous figures with uncommon sensitivity and nuance.
“Jackson provided the viewing public with some of the first consistent examples in American art of blacks as dynamic and heterogenous individuals,” writes historian Lisa E. Farrington in Creating Their Own Image: The History of African-American Women Artists.
Though she exhibited widely throughout her career, including at the Corcoran Gallery in D.C. and the National Academy of Design in New York, Jackson was largely locked out of the highest echelons of the art world due to her race. Her acceptance to the Washington Society of Fine Arts, for example, was withdrawn when the society learned of her African descent. She died in 1931.
4. Robert S. Duncanson (1821-1872)
Hailed as “the best landscape painter in the West” in a 1861 review by the Daily Cincinnati Gazette, and described by the Smithsonian American Art Museum as “perhaps the most accomplished African American painter in the United States from 1850 to 1860,” Robert Seldon Duncanson charted an unlikely path to artistic renown.
Born free in 1822 to a white father and African American mother, Duncanson taught himself how to draw, and by 1842 was exhibiting in Cincinnati, Ohio, then a hub for visual arts. His work attracted the attention of local abolitionist and horticulturist Nicholas Longworth, who commissioned Duncanson to paint a series of landscape murals for his estate. Duncanson executed them in his characteristic style, rendering transcendent vistas of lush foliage and shifting light. These large-scale trompe-l'oeil panels, measuring over 9 feet and spanning the entirety of the manor’s entrance hall, are still considered some of Duncanson’s finest works.
As one of the wealthiest men in the United States, Longworth's patronage significantly boosted Duncanson’s profile among collectors as well as the public, enabling him to travel to Europe in 1853. Duncanson was likely the first African American artist to embark on this customary Grand Tour, where he visited the sites and artworks considered essential for an artist’s education.
When the Civil War broke out, Duncanson worked between Canada and Europe. His art gained further acclaim and patronage among European aristocrats—admirers included Queen Victoria, Lord Tennyson and the King of Sweden—and cemented his status as an eminent landscape painter. At the height of his success, Duncanson suffered a mental collapse and died in Michigan in 1872.
5. Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901)
Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in New Brunswick, Canada in 1828, but spent the majority of his life working in Massachusetts and Rhode Island. Despite little formal training and no European exposure, Bannister became nationally known after landing the top prize at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876—making him the first African American artist to win a national award.
Following a less-than-charmed childhood—his parents died when he was young, and he spent his teenage years working at sea—Bannister moved to Boston in 1848. He attended evening drawing classes while working during the day as a barber. Greatly influenced by the Barbizon School—a movement of French landscape painters then popular stateside—Bannister’s paintings mostly depicted pastoral scenes and New England’s rugged natural beauty.
“Images of the landscape as a benign setting, especially in the late 19th century, can be considered a comment on the rapid industrialization of cities and urban areas,” notes Peter Larocque, a curator at the New Brunswick Museum, which holds several of Bannister’s works. “There was an eager market for the subject matter, so there may [also] be an astute commercial aspect. It’s hard to imagine patrons who would be seeking overtly politically charged subject matter."
After the Civil War, Bannister settled in Rhode Island, where he became a leading figure in Providence’s art scene. In 1876, his painting Under the Oaks won the first-place medal at that year’s Philadelphia Exposition, launching him to national notoriety. (When the judges learned of Bannister’s race, they initially considered revoking the award.) The painting later sold in Boston for $1,500, a record price for a work by a living American artist at the time.
Following the Philadelphia Exposition, Bannister enjoyed critical and financial success. Once a recipient of patronage, he eventually became a patron himself. He was one of the founding board members of the Rhode Island School of Design and helped establish the Providence Art Club in 1880.
