Edward Mitchell Bannister

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Driving Home the Cows, 1881, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Edward Mitchell Bannister (* 1828 in St. Andrews , New Brunswick , Canada ; † January 9, 1901 in Providence , Rhode Island , USA ) was an African-American painter whose tonalism and primarily pastoral subjects much of his admiration for Millet and the French School of Owe Barbizon .

In the late 1840s, Bannister moved to New England , where he stayed for the rest of his life. While Bannister was well known in the artistic community of his adopted home Providence and admired in the wider East Coast art world (he won a bronze medal for his large oil painting "Under the Oaks" on the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial ), he was for nearly one The 20th century has largely been forgotten for a number of reasons, most notably racial.

With the rise of the African American civil rights movement in the 1970s, his work was again celebrated and collected. In 1978 Rhode Island College dedicated its art gallery in Bannister's name with the exhibition "Four From Providence ~ Alston, Bannister, Jennings & Prophet". This event was attended and commented on by numerous important political figures of the time and supported by the Rhode Island Committee for Humanities and the Rhode Island Historical Society. Events like this, across the entire cultural landscape, ensure that his life and work will not be forgotten again.

Although known primarily for his idealized landscape painting and seascapes , he also painted portraits , biblical and mythological scenes, and genre scenes. He was an intellectual self-taught, his taste in literature was typical of a trained Victorian painter, such as Spenser , Vergil , Ruskin and Tennyson , from whose works much of his iconography is derived.

Bannister died at a prayer meeting in his church. He is buried in the North Burial Ground in Providence.

Important works

  • The Newsboy [Boston Newsboy] [Newspaper Boy] (1869; oil; 30 1/8 × 25 in .; NMAA, Washington DC)
  • Sabin Point, Narragansett Bay (1885; oil on canvas; Gardner House, Providence, Rhode Island)
  • Palmer River (1885; oil on canvas; private collection)

bibliography

  • Anne Louise Avery, The Veiled Landscape: Space and Place in the Art and Life of Edward Mitchell Bannister [Unpublished dissertation, 2007]
  • Romare Bearden and Harry Henderson, A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present, (Pantheon, 1993, ISBN 0-394-57016-2 ).
  • Juanita Marie Holland and Corrine Jennings, Edward Mitchell Bannister [exhibition catalog] (New York: Kenkeleba House, 1992, ISBN 0-8109-6811-8 )

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Bannister, Edward Mitchell
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American painter
DATE OF BIRTH 1828
PLACE OF BIRTH St. Andrews , New Brunswick , Canada
DATE OF DEATH January 9, 1901
Place of death Providence , Rhode Island , USA