Henry Ossawa Tanner was America’s first internationally renowned African American artist. He first studied under Thomas Eakins, but in 1891 traveled to Paris to study at the Académie Julien with Benjamin Constant and J.P. Laurens. His painting Music Lesson was accepted into the Salon of 1894. In 1896 his painting Daniel in the Lion’s Den won an honorable mention at the Salon, inspiring a visit to the Holy Land that resulted in a shift to the religious themes Tanner is best known for. While Paris became his permanent home after 1904, he still exhibited in the United States, earning silver medals at Buffalo in 1901 and St. Louis in 1904, and a gold medal at the Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco in 1915.
Tanner’s earlier paintings reflect the dark brown tones and painstaking realism of Eakins. By the later 1890s his style became broader and more generalized, often incorporating a bluish tonality. Tanner’s work was founded on the careful drawing of the academic tradition, but was richly overlaid by layers of paint and glaze that developed a freer, more impressionistic or abstract flavor.