Art History Time! Edward Mitchell Bannister and Landscapes

This post was inspired by someone in a historical art group on Facebook asking, "Are there no black artists who worked in these years [1850-1950]?" 

The answer to that is, there weren't many working in Fine Art due to reasons I presume I don't have to explain; nevertheless there were a few who made it. And they're often overlooked due to their artwork looking just the same as anything else from the time.

Indeed, there's an assumption nowadays that a black artist must be making work about the experience of being black. Surely, you might think, he'd paint black subjects, or his art would look African-inspired! This was not the expectation of art in the 19th century, nor would it have likely been popular under the circumstances of the time. A person painting African-inspired art would have been denigrated to the level of "folk artist" and any attempts infiltrate the Fine Art world with such pieces would have been ridiculed, at best, as evidence of ignorance (at least until the Post-Impressionists developed the kind of pictures that even to this day get people saying, "I don't like art, I like pictures that look like things.") Thus, the successful black artists of the 19th century made the kind of artwork that was pleasing to the Victorian art-critic's eye, and that was inevitably what we would nowadays call "kitsch." It mustn't be supposed that the black artists were working away in disgust, barred from making the kind of ethnic-oriented pictures they really wanted in favor of painting sweet trash that would appease the whites -- expecting a 19th century artist of any race to have a modern-day aesthetic and sensibility is as ludicrous as expecting Jane Austen should have written books in the style of Mad Max: Fury Road. Moreover, if you were a black person taking the trouble to break into the world of Victorian Fine Art, odds are it was because Victorian Fine Art was what you wanted to paint.

Today we share the work of one such black man who totally failed to anticipate what people 120 years after his death would have wanted him to paint in retrospect. Also, he tends confuse people by not being "African American" in the usual sense of the word because he was... Canadian.

Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in 1828 in St. Andrews, New Brunswick. By the age of 16 he was an orphan, and he with his brother William moved to live on the farm of the wealthy white merchant Harris Hatch. There, he practiced drawing by studying and reproducing two Hatch family portraits, as well as studying the family library and Bible. He later moved to Boston.

At first, he was self-taught and received his first oil painting commission The Ship Outward Bound in 1854 from an African American doctor, John V. DeGrasse. Bannister eventually studied at the Lowell Institute with the artist William Rimmer for about a year. Through Rimmer and the community at the Studio Building, Bannister was inspired by the Barbizon school-influenced paintings of William Morris Hunt, who had studied in Europe and held numerous public exhibitions in Boston around the 1860s. He also formed a temporary painting partnership with Asa R. Lewis that lasted only the year of 1868 to 1869. During that partnership of "Bannister & Lewis", Bannister began to advertise himself as both a portrait and landscape painter.

Despite his early commissions, Bannister still struggled to receive recognition for his work due to racism in the US. An 1867 article in the New York Herald apparently belittled both him and his work, stating "[...] the negro has an appreciation for art while being manifestly unable to produce it." The article reportedly spurred his desire to achieve success as an artist.

Supported by his wife's successful hairdressing business, Bannister was able to become a full-time painter from 1870 on, shortly after they moved to Providence, Rhode Island at the end of 1869. Bannister finally received national commendation for his artistic skill when he won first prize for his large oil Under the Oaks at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial. Unfortunately the painting is now lost, though a surviving sketch of it shows it to depict a flock of sheep next to a pond, resting beneath an oak grove. It might be similar in coloring to the sheep scene featured below.

I have shared here a few of my own favorites from Bannister's works, but you can see many more at the Smithsonian's Collection.