Continents and Cultures the Art and Life of Henry Ossawa Tanner

This lyrical and evocative landscape is probably the showtime major painting of Henry Ossawa Tanner'southward early maturity, and may have been exhibited presently later on completion at both the Pennsylvania University of the Fine Arts and the National Academy of Design in New York. Information technology may also mark the culmination of his formal study with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy. For although information technology is often said that Tanner entered the academy when he was 20 or 21 (1879 or 1880) and remained in that location sporadically until 1885, the Academy's own records indicate that he "studied at the Academy in 1884 and 1885, having been admitted to the school by Eakins's special asking."1 Early in 1886 Thomas Eakins was forced to resign his teaching position and Tanner opened his own studio in Philadelphia.

Sand Dunes is synthetic with a bold sweep of windblown beach bordered past rise dunes. Remarkably, where sand is depicted, the artist actually mixed sand into his pigments to emulate the texture.2 The viewpoint is that of an isolated stroller on the lonely strand, walking in the shallow trough toward the water'southward edge. The water is only glimpsed ahead in calm, low rollers breaking on the beach, the ocean merely a sliver below the dusky sky. It is the dunescape itself that mimics the ocean'south eternal movement.three In the scrubby vegetation Tanner captures exactly the permanently windbent attitude of the hardy clumps of sea grass that rhythmically stud the sand. The band of absurd gray-green shadow that divides the film seems to echo the movement of the unfelt air current. The sunday (out of the picture at the right: nosotros are facing east) tinges the sky with a rosy glow, and the moon rises through the haze of approaching evening.

Tanner'due south painting is strikingly original. But in its tranquillity it is in harmony with the work of other American landscape artists in the post-Civil War decades, from the once-famous Alexander Harrison to the notwithstanding-famous McNeill Whistler, whose paintings evoked a contemplative timelessness. In particular it has a full general resemblance to the work of the older Philadelphia artist William Trost Richards who, while dividing his time between Europe and the Philadelphia expanse during Tanner'south Philadelphia years, exhibited regularly at the Pennsylvania University. Elements of composition and tonal expression, from the cupped landscape to the wide bands of shadow to the hazy moon, may exist found in Richards's paintings as in Tanner's Sand Dunes.

It should as well be recalled that Eakins had been painting landscapes along the Delaware River in the early 1880s. The older artist had been experimenting intensely with photography, and had used the process in producing his landscape paintings. There is no testify that Tanner emulated his instructor in his own mural painting, only he probably had studied photography nether Eakins'due south informal guidance. For although Eakins was non permitted to teach photography or integrate it into his educational activity at the University, when Tanner left Philadelphia for Atlanta, Georgia, in 1889, it was to set up a photographic portrait studio. Eakins himself had begun photographing his sitters in the mid-1880s, as an aid in painting their portraits.

Henry Ossawa Tanner'southward female parent was born a slave and escaped due north through the Underground Railroad. His father was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church building. Their son's unusual middle name was bestowed in laurels of the abolitionist John Brown, whose militancy had begun in Osawatomie, Kansas. To further his art and to escape racism, Henry Tanner moved to Paris in 1891, where he was to receive many honors. His expatriatism was not without bitterness: "[Racism] has driven me out of the country and while I cannot sing our National Hymn . . . still deep down in my heart I love it and am sometimes deplorable that I cannot live where my heart is." His heart was a meditative one, tinged with melancholy. Although he is widely known for the religious images that he began to paint in the mid-1890s, Sand Dunes in its profound quietude is as reverential and equally memorable every bit those more than overtly sacred scenes.

Essay by William Kloss, Art in the White House, 2d edition (Washington, DC: White House Historical Clan, 2008), 192. Copyright © 2008 by White House Historical Association.

one Dewey F. Mosby, Across Continents and Cultures: The Fine art and Life of Henry Ossawa Tanner (Kansas City: Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art, 1995), p. 24, believed it was the flick shown at the Pennsylvania Academy in 1885 and the National Academy in 1886 as Dorsum from the Beach. Louise Lippincott, "Thomas Eakins and the Academy," In This University (Philadelphia: The Pennsylvania University, 1976), p. 182, clarified Tanner'due south study at PAFA.

2 The sand in the painting was noted in a 1988 examination report at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, prior to restoration (files, Office of the Curator, the White House). Information technology is quite unlikely, nonetheless, especially given the size of the painting, that he really painted it on the embankment and that the sand blew onto the canvas, as has been suggested. Rather, he would have carried some sand to his studio, working information technology into his pigments there. It might have been painted in the cottage that his parents often rented at Atlantic Urban center during the summer months. Tanner gave the painting to them.

three Other artists have observed and recorded the same role-reversal of ocean and dune, for example William Merritt Hunt in the White House collection's Shinnecock Hills, Long Island.

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Source: https://artsandculture.google.com/asset/sand-dunes-at-sunset-atlantic-city/HQEsrBkvFakSeA?hl=en

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