ABSTRACT
In her discussion of two domestic genre scenes by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Judith Wilson argues that although the technical sophistication of these works testifies to Tanner’s artistic maturation and his allegiance to European aesthetic ideals, his strategic choice of subjects—black musical and religious practice—also enabled him to subtly undermine two very specific stereotypes of African Americans. Contrary to the widespread popular belief in innate black musicality and the superstitious emotionalism of black religion, Tanner crafts an image of African Americans in these paintings that personifies instead the values of education and dignified self-restraint fostered by the African Methodist Episcopal Church and black intellectuals such as W.E.B. Du Bois.
As an educated black man who embodied the ideological tension of the so-called talented tenth, Tanner sought to convey a conception of African-American life and behavior more consistent with his own experience. Wilson further establishes that the radical challenge to prevailing representational conventions raised by these paintings has been overlooked in the face of an emergent black cultural nationalism that eschews earlier strategies of accommodation embraced by Tanner and his peers at the turn of the nineteenth century.
