Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859 - 1937)

Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner was a late 19th- and early 20th-century American artist who spent most of his career in France. He is known as a realist painter and as the first Negro artist to achieve international recognition.

Henry Tanner painted landscapes, religious subjects, and genre paintings depicting everyday scenes of African American life. Many of his works dealt with the plight of African Americans. Tanner's creative style was characterized by a variety of approaches: in some cases, he was careful to elaborate details, in other - he wrote free expressive strokes. He often experimented with light in his works, which sometimes added symbolic meaning to religious subjects.