ABSTRACT
In October 1860, Reverend Benjamin Tucker Tanner, the father of Henry Ossawa Tanner, took a temporary assignment as pastor of the Fifteenth Street Presbyterian Church in Washington, DC. He soon sent for his wife, Sarah Elizabeth Miller Tanner, and infant son, Henry, who were still living in Pittsburgh. The naming of their first-born carried significant meaning for the Tanners, especially in the selection of his middle name where Reverend Tanner's strong personal feelings about the times in which he lived became part of Henry's legacy. Tanner was now close to North Elba, New York, where abolitionist Gerrit Smith's appeal to provide land grants for former slaves attracted John Brown in 1848, who remained there until he set off to Kansas in 1855 and became the legendary "Osawatomie" Brown. Eakins' ability to achieve a precise psychological reading of his sitter was never more apparent than in his portrait of Tanner.
