​Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) was an American artist who spent much of his career in France. He became the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study at the Académie Julian and gained acclaim in French artistic circles. In 1923, the French government elected Tanner chevalier of the Legion of Honor.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. 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. He was educated at Avery College and Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, and developed a literary career. In addition, he was a political activist, supporting abolition of slavery. Henry Tanner's mother Sarah Elizabeth Tanner may have been born into slavery in Virginia. 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. In the other, she escapes as a refugee to the North via the Underground Railroad. There she met and married Benjamin Tucker Tanner.
Tanner was the first of at least five children, and two of his brothers, Benjamin and Horace, died in infancy. One of his sisters, Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson, was the first woman to be certified to practice medicine in Alabama. His parents gave him a middle name that commemorated the struggle at Osawatomie between pro- and anti-slavery partisans. The family moved from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia when Tanner was a teenager. There his father became a friend of Frederick Douglass, sometimes supporting him, sometimes criticizing. Robert Douglass, Jr., a successful black artist in Philadelphia, was an early neighbor of the Tanner family, and Tanner wrote that he "used to pass and always stopped to look at his pictures in the window." When Tanner was about 13 years old, he saw a landscape painter working in Fairmount Park, where he was walking with his father.