Edward Mitchell Bannister

Edward Mitchell Bannister was a Canadian-American oil painter of the American Barbizon school. Born in Canada, he spent his adult life in New England in the United States. There, along with his wife Christiana Carteaux, he was a prominent member of African-American cultural and political communities, such as the Boston abolition movement. Bannister received national recognition after he won a first prize in painting at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. He was also a founding member of the Providence Art Club and the Rhode Island School of Design.

Bannister's style and predominantly pastoral subject matter reflected his admiration for the French artist Jean-François Millet and the French Barbizon school. A lifelong sailor, he also looked to the Rhode Island seaside for inspiration. Bannister continually experimented, and his artwork displays his Idealist philosophy and his control of color and atmosphere. He began his professional practice as a photographer and portraitist before developing his better-known landscape style.

Later in his life, Bannister's style of landscape painting fell out of favor. With decreasing painting sales, he and Christiana Carteaux moved out of College Hill in Providence to Boston and then a smaller house on Wilson Street in Providence. Bannister was overlooked in American art historical studies and exhibitions after his death in 1901, until institutions like the National Museum of African Art returned him to national attention in the 1960s and 1970s.

The young Bannister advertised himself as a portraitist, but later became popular for his landscapes and seascapes.: 25  Drawing on his knowledge of poetry, classics, and English literature as an autodidact,: 47  he also painted biblical, mythological, and genre scenes. Much like George Inness,: 178  his work reflected the composition, mood, and influences of French Barbizon painters Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot, Jean-François Millet, and Charles-François Daubigny. Defending Millet in The Artist and His Critics, Bannister saw him as the most "spiritual artist of our time" who voiced "the sad, uncomplaining life he saw about him-and with which he sympathized so deeply."

Historian Joseph Skerrett has noted the influence of the Hudson River School on Bannister, while maintaining that he consistently experimented throughout his career: "Bannister managed to please a conservative New England taste in art while continuing to try new methods and styles." For their mutual affinity with the Hudson River School, Bannister has been compared to his contemporary, the Ohio-based African American painter Robert S. Duncanson. Unlike Hudson River School artists,: 49  Bannister did not create meticulous landscapes: 126  but paid more attention to creating "massive but revealing shapes of trees and mountains" and works more picturesque than sublime.: 49  Bannister also avoided the "nationalist grandeur" often found in Hudson River School paintings.: 177

Bannister often made pencil or pastel studies in preparation for larger oil paintings. Several of his compositions refer to classical, mathematical methods like the Golden Ratio or "Harmonic Grid", and make careful use of symmetry and asymmetry. In other paintings, his contrast of darks and lights create dynamic diagonals or circles that divide the composition.: 13  His paintings are known for their delicate use of color to depict shadow and atmosphere and their loose brushwork. His later palette exhibited lighter, more muted colors: the Boston Common scene he painted late in his life is a notable example. This change in style stands in contrast to his earlier stated disapproval of Impressionist painting.: 53

Art historian Traci Lee Costa has argued that a "reductive" emphasis on Bannister's biography has taken attention away from scholarly analysis of his artwork.: 89  In the lecture The Artist and His Critics given to the Anne Eliza Club on April 15, 1886, and published afterward, Bannister spelled out his belief that making art is a highly spiritual practice-the pinnacle of human achievement. In its nearly religious approach and focus on subjective representations of nature, Bannister's philosophy has been compared to both German Idealism and American Transcendentalism. In his lecture, Bannister referenced the works of American Transcendentalist Washington Allston. Bannister's friend George W. Whitaker referred to him as "The Idealist" in a 1914 article "Reminiscences of Providence Artists".: 100  The lecture and its idealistic view are linked to Bannister's Approaching Storm (see right), which he completed in the same year. Approaching Storm features a human figure at its center, which is nonetheless rendered small by the surrounding landscape. Despite the implied drama, Bannister used a cool color palette of blues and greens, with contrasting yellows that provide warmth against the darker, almost purple sky.: 97  The contrast of melancholy elements against more cheerful pastoral themes appears in many of Bannister's paintings.

Although committed to freedom and equal rights for African Americans, Bannister did not often directly represent those issues in his paintings.: 46  The farms that Bannister painted were reminders of southern Rhode Island's history of chattel slavery, unlike French Barbizon scenes.: 59  In Hay Gatherers, Bannister depicts African American field laborers in a rural landscape. Unlike Bannister's idyllic pastorals, Hay Gatherers represents racial oppression and labor exploitation in Rhode Island, particularly South County where most of the state's plantations were.: 13  The women workers are separated from the field of wildflowers at the painting's lower left and other field workers in the background by stands of trees, suggesting their closeness to freedom even while they are still within the grasp of plantation labor.: 61  Through the geometric composition of Hay Gatherers, which divides the figures and the landscapes into triangular sections, Bannister combined his work on seemingly idealized landscapes with his earlier political art, visible in his humanist portraits such as Newspaper Boy. Bannister's Fort Dumpling, Jamestown, Rhode Island uses a similar triangular composition, whereby people relaxing are juxtaposed against but separated from sailboats in the background, a reminder of the "maritime legacy of slavery".: 67

Bannister often conveyed political meaning in his paintings through allegory and allusion. One of his first commissions, The Ship Outward Bound, might have been a veiled reference to the forced return of Anthony Burns to slavery and Virginia under the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 in 1854. In African American culture, an image of a ship leaving harbor was a reminder of the Transatlantic Slave Trade.: 20  Bannister's 1885 drawing The Woodsman is thought to be Bannister's response to the murder of Amasa Sprague, an event that spurred the abolition of capital punishment in Rhode Island after the dubious conviction and hanging of John Gordon.: 13  Similarly, his Governor Sprague's White Horse depicted the horse that William Sprague IV rode into the First Battle of Bull Run.: 15

Bannister has been criticized for not often directly representing African Americans, outside of his early portraiture. He and artists like Henry Ossawa Tanner were deemed inauthentic during the Harlem Renaissance for producing works that appealed to white aesthetics.: 70  Many of Bannister's works were commissioned landscapes and portraits that reinforced European ideas, even though his art subtly dismantled racial stereotypes.: 29  In that way, Bannister has been compared to later Bostonian poet William Stanley Braithwaite, whose writing did not clearly reflect his identity.: 29  Bannister's work reflected his desire to excel and contribute to racial uplift, while still needing to depend on white patronage to reach a wider audience.: 13,47 : 69  Art historian Juanita Holland wrote of Bannister's dilemma: "This was a large part of the double bind that [Boston's] black artists faced: they needed to both address and represent an African American identity, while finding a way for their white viewers to look past race to a perception of the work in more universal terms.": 104

Text courtesy of Wikipedia, 2024