Edward Mitchell Bannister

Artist

• Born: c. 1828
• Birthplace: St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada
• Died: January 9, 1901
• Place of death: Providence, Rhode Island

A self-taught student of European tonal painting and French and British nature landscapes, Bannister emerged as the first nationally recognized African American painter. He famously won the top prize at the 1876 American Centennial Exposition, beating many prominent white artists.

Early Life

Edward Mitchell Bannister was born just north of Maine’s border with Canada, in a remote New Brunswick coastal fishing village. Records of his birth are inexact, but he is believed to have been born circa 1828. Bannister’s father was a native of Barbados; his mother was white. Bannister grew up exploring his coastal world, intoxicated by its harsh beauty. He began drawing before he was five years old. When he was six, his father died, followed by his mother when he was still in his teens. After her death, Bannister lived as a servant with a wealthy local white family. He attended public school regularly through his thirteenth year and only intermittently after that. Finally unable to tolerate a life of such diminished expectations, Bannister, at age seventeen, signed on as a cook on a merchant boat.

Bannister embraced the ocean, enthralled by its sublime grandeur. In addition, at ports of call up and down New England, Bannister explored art museums and then went to a public library to learn about the painters and their techniques. In 1848, he settled in Boston, where he worked at low-paying and undistinguished jobs, ending up as a barber in a salon that catered to the city’s wealthiest families. Given his love for the visual arts, Bannister also worked as a photographer, specializing in tinting portraits done in the new process of daguerreotypes. Through it all, however, he painted. Denied access to any art academy because of his race, Bannister attended free evening lectures on art theory at the experimental Lowell Institute, an educational foundation funded by the wealthy Lowells. He practiced his artwork patiently and tirelessly. Frustrated over his imprecise technique, he destroyed hundreds of canvases. Later in his life, he recalled seeing an article in a New York newspaper that claimed that African Americans could not appreciate the finesse and intricacy of classical painting. These racist sentiments drove him to master those very techniques and become the first successful African American artist.

Life’s Work

Bannister’s life took a dramatic turn in 1857 when he married the wealthy owner-operator of the salon where he cut hair. Christiana Babcock Carteaux was a Narragansett Indian from Rhode Island. After they married, she was determined to make Bannister famous. She provided Bannister with one of the best-equipped art studios in New England and all the time he required to practice his technique. Even as Bannister worked on his art, the couple became prominent fund-raisers in Boston’s abolitionist movement. At the peak of the Civil War, Bannister was among the most vocal proponents of equal compensation for African Americans in the Union Army.

Within two years of his marriage, Bannister had exhibited in numerous modest local shows, showing paintings largely inspired by his love of Bible narratives and his fascination with spectacle scenes from history, both European and American. However, his success was slight. It was not until just before the war that Bannister found his inspiration. He was exposed to a new genre of French rural painting known as the Barbizon school (named for an artist community just south of Paris). Bannister was enthralled by the idyllic paintings of rustic subjects (most notably those of Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot and Jean-François Millet), nature without symbolic affectations, painterly effects, or intrusive allusions from classical literature or the Bible. These scenes recalled his childhood in the woods of New Brunswick. The landscapes were dominated by browns, grays, blues, and blacks applied thickly without detailing. The subjects were simple—haystacks, trees in fog, grazing cows, sunrises, rainbows, clouds. By 1863, Bannister’s own landscapes had made him among the most successful artists in Boston.

In 1870, Bannister moved to Christiana’s hometown of Providence, Rhode Island, where he found himself within an easy walk of both woods and ocean. Bannister traipsed about the natural world on the outskirts of Providence, sketching at will and returning to his studio to execute his paintings. The product of one such stroll, a study he titled Under the Oaks, was accepted for judging at the prestigious national competition sponsored in conjunction with the 1876 American Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. Against competition from some of the most prominent white American artists of the time, Bannister was awarded the bronze medal as best in show. Overnight, he became the most prominent black artist in America.

For the next twenty years, Bannister enjoyed a prominent position in Providence’s thriving artistic community. In 1878, he helped found the Rhode Island Museum of Art and School of Design, which remained among the most respected art schools in the country into the twenty-first century. He produced a significant number of commissioned canvases, mostly landscapes, seascapes, and still lifes. He seldom did portraits, and in fact few of his works had human figures. As Bannister’s style evolved, his paintings became increasingly influenced by the Impressionists, the subjects he selected loosely rendered in swirls and arches of color.

Although Bannister and his wife continued to support the artistic community in Providence, his style fell out of vogue and he had lapsed into obscurity by the 1890’s. He suffered financial setbacks and in his later years had bouts of memory loss that rendered him unable to work. Bannister died of a massive coronary at a prayer meeting in 1901.

Significance

When the bucolic pastoral idealism in Bannister’s best work lost its cultural appeal and American art began to explore gritty urban realism, Bannister’s paintings lost their relevance. It was difficult for later African American cultural historians to position Bannister, as his major works reflected European aesthetics. In his best work, however, the self-taught Bannister expressed the complex vision that was part of the American imagination from the Puritans to the New England Transcendentalists: the sacramental sense of nature itself. Coming from Bannister’s own roots in Christianity, that vision created in his landscapes a sense of inspired spirituality, ambient light, and irrepressible animation. When his work was rediscovered nearly fifty years after his death, art critics lauded that very American sensibility.

Bibliography

Groseclose, Barbara. Nineteenth Century American Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 2000. Examines Bannister as a landscape artist and part of the late-century tension between rural and urban schools of art.

Holland, Juanita. Narratives of African American Art and Identity. Petaluma, Calif.: Pomegranate Communications, 1998. Compelling account of the evolution of African American art and the tension in Bannister’s generation between exploring those roots and defining their artistic credentials against European models and standards.

Lewis, Samella. African American Art and Artists. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Comprehensive chronicle of the history of African American art and artists through brief, highly accessible entries with helpful illustrations.

Patton, Sharon F. African American Art. New York: Oxford University Press, 1998. Includes African American landscape painters Bannister and Robert Duncanson as the first artists to express the African American formal, rather than folk, imagination.