Introduction

Henry Ossawa Tanner was eight years old when a southerner from North Carolina, Hinton Rowan Helper, published a scathing racist treatise, Nojoque: A Question for a Continent that denigrated all Americans sharing the slightest trace of "African ancestry." Helper appeared to be ignorant of any form of African American artistic achievement prior to 1867. And even if he was aware that such creativity existed - and it did - he would never acknowledge it. For him and scores of other racist white Americans, the very idea of an African American competing with Caucasians in the fine arts was unthinkable. Helper offered no new ideas on race matters in Nojoque; he merely reiterated and reinforced what others had said or written before him, thus drawing an eager audience from across an almost uniform spectrum of like-minded believers. Robert Seldon Duncanson was America's first great landscape painter of African descent.