Tanner, Henry Ossawa (1859–1937)

US painter. A major 19th-century black painter of religious and genre scenes, he studied with Thomas Eakins (1880–82). Tormented by racial persecution, he settled in Paris in 1891 and only briefly returned to America (1902–04). His early atmospheric genre works, such as The Banjo Lesson (c. 1893), have been recently rediscovered and praised by the art world. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.