The Banjo Lesson
It depicts two African-Americans in a humble domestic setting: an old black man is teaching a young boy – possibly his grandson – to play the banjo.
[3] His mother may have been born a slave in Virginia;[4][5] his father was a free-born black minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church and became a bishop in 1888.
[3] After studying with Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1879, where he was one of its first black students, Tanner ran a photography business in Atlanta, Georgia, from 1889,[3] and taught drawing at Clark College.
[6] His business was not a success, and he left to study in Rome in 1891, sponsored by Bishop Joseph Crane Hartzell of the (white) Methodist Episcopal Church.
[8] Ultimately, Tanner would spend more than a year on this recuperative visit to his native country during which time he painted or finished a number of iconic genre works, including The Thankful Poor and The Bagpipe Lesson, and he engaged in civil-rights work, speaking as a public figure at the 1893 Chicago Exposition and exhibiting The Bagpipe Lesson there.
Tanner made other paintings featuring African Americans in a positive light during this U.S. visit, including The Thankful Poor and Portrait of the Artist's Mother.
In 1888, Tanner visited the Blue Ridge Mountains at Highlands, North Carolina, spending a summer sketching and photographing residents.
[27][28] There has been confusion on this, as prominent web sources such as the White House Historical Association have said that it was The Banjo Lesson that was on display at the exposition.
About the same time that he was working on The Banjo Lesson, Tanner completed a very similar image based on a photograph, used to illustrate a story in Harper's Young People.
[20] His genre painting The Banjo Lesson resembles the illustration in "Uncle Tim's Compromise on Christmas" by Ruth McEnery Stuart, published in December 1893 in Harper's Young People (volume 15, page 84).
It was the one thing the little boy counted on as a precious future property, and often, at all hours of the day or evening, old Tim could be seen sitting before the cabin, his arms around the boy, who stood between his knees, while, with eyes closed, he ran his withered fingers over the strings, picking out the tunes that best recalled the stories of olden days that he loved to tell into the little fellow's ear.
"[32] Those arguments were disputed by Naurice Frank Woods Jr.[32] He points out that whatever reasons Tanner had for making other versions of the painting, he made the final version of The Banjo Lesson during the period in which he was steeped in civil-rights work, including starting a chapter of the National Citizens Rights Association (NCRA) and lecturing on "The American Negro in Art" at the World's Congress on Africa.
The painting depicts a grey-haired old man sitting on a chair in his sparsely furnished home, with a boy standing close before him between his spread legs holding the musical instrument.
In the background, some crockery and a loaf of bread are placed on a table or sideboard, with a few small pictures on the bare wall, a second chair, and a coat hanging beside a shelf.
[34] The two subjects are similar to those in Tanner's 1894 painting The Thankful Poor, which depicts the old man and young boy sitting at a table, praying before a meal.
[35][6] After failing to prosper in Atlanta drawing, taking photos and teaching, he spent the summer of 1888 in Highlands, North Carolina, in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
[6] Judith Wilson contends that Tanner "lifted what Du Bois would call 'the Veil of Race' to give art audiences an unprecedented 'inside look' at Afro-American culture".
[39] In it, Tanner subverts the stereotypical images of caricatured cheerful minstrels playing the banjo and dancing, and tropes of innate black musicality, portraying instead a calm and sentimental domestic scene with one generation passing on their knowledge and instructing another.
