[1] Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian and gained acclaim in French artistic circles.

[4] His father Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835–1923) became a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church (AME), the first independent black denomination in the United States.

[6][7] Two different stories have emerged concerning her living in freedom; in one, her father drives the family from Winchester, Virginia to "the free state of Pennsylvania" in an ox cart.

[8] Although many white artists refused to accept an African-American apprentice, in 1879 Tanner enrolled at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia, becoming the only black student.

[12] His decision to attend the school came at a time when art academies increasingly focused on study from live models rather than plaster casts.

[14] At the Academy, Tanner befriended artists with whom he kept in contact throughout the rest of his life, most notably Robert Henri, one of the founders of the Ashcan School.

During a relatively short time at the Academy, Tanner developed a thorough knowledge of anatomy and the skill to express his understanding of the weight and structure of the human figure on the canvas.

[16] Tanner's teachers included Thomas Eakins (American realism, photography), Thomas Hovenden (American realism), Benjamin Constant (orientalist paintings and portraits, French academic) and Jean-Paul Laurens (history painting, French academic).

[17][18] Tanner painted landscapes, religious subjects, and scenes of daily life in a realistic style that echoed that of Eakins.

[19][20] While works like The Banjo Lesson depicted everyday scenes of African American life, Tanner later painted religious subjects.

[22] Warmer compositions such as The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896) and The Annunciation (1898) express the intensity and fire of religious moments, and the elation of transcendence between the divine and humanity.

In The Annunciation (1898), for example, the archangel Gabriel is represented as a column of light that forms, together with the shelf in the upper left corner, a cross.

[25] In his autobiography, The Story of an Artist's Life, Tanner described the burden of racism: I was extremely timid and to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterwards caused me sometimes weeks of pain.

[29] On a return visit to the United States in 1893, Tanner presented, “The American Negro in Art,” an essay, at the World’s Congress on Africa in Chicago,[4] and painted The Banjo Lesson, one of his most recognized works that began as a series of sketches of Black people living in Appalachia.

[35] In Paris, Tanner continued his studies under renowned artists such as Jean Joseph Benjamin Constant and Jean-Paul Laurens.

"[36] A transitional work from this period is the recently rediscovered painting of a fishing boat tossed on the waves, which is held by the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

[15] Later that year he painted The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896, Musée d'Orsay, Paris) that was purchased by the French government after winning the third-place medal at the 1897 Salon.

[40] Tanner did not exhibit at the Salon in 1907, due to eye strain, but in 1908 entered The Wise and Foolish Virgins which he worked on in 1906, 1907 and finished in 1908.

Newspapers don't record a Salon entry for 1909; but he focused his 1908 energy on a one-man exhibition of his artwork in New York, and the 1909 papers continued to talk about that event.

[41] In 1914, Tanner's mother died,[42] World War I started, and he returned to the Paris Salon after "several years of absence," bringing his 1912 painting Christ in the House of Lazarus and Mary.

[21] Tanner's friends and colleagues included Hermon MacNeil (sculptor), Hermann Dudley Murphy (landscapes), Paul Gauguin (synthetism), Myron G. Barlow (genre painting), Charles Hovey Pepper (Japanese style woodblocks).

Rockwell's proposed cover of the Literary Digest in 1922, for example, shows an older black man playing the banjo for his grandson.

The painting is a landscape with a "view across the cool gray of a shadowed beach to dunes made pink by the late afternoon sunlight.

It was bought for $100,000 by the White House Endowment Fund during the Bill Clinton administration from Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter, grandniece of the artist.