While walking in Fairmount Park in 1872 with his minister father, 12-year-old Henry Ossawa Tanner saw a man painting and became curious about art. His family fed that curiosity, which led Tanner to study painting at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (PAFA), continue his studies in Paris, ultimately build an international reputation as an important religious painter, and use his status to mentor and support young artists for decades—all remarkable achievements, but even more remarkable for an African-American in the late 19^th century. In Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit, at the PAFA through April 15, 2012, curator Anna O. Marley and her fellow researchers seek to resurrect this forgotten father of African-American art from the tomb of obscurity built over the nearly eight decades since his death. But just as Tanner himself shunned the title in life, the exhibition and catalog invite the idea while simultaneously showing him as an artist that transcended all labels, especially those of race.

The first room of the exhibition begins with the foundation of Tanner’s art—his family. A portrait bust of his father (a distinguished a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church) and a oil portrait modeled on Whistler’s Mother of his mother (a former slave) pay homage to the roots of Henry’s faith and fortitude. A portrait of Henry by his teacher Thomas Eakins and a painting now owned by Henry’s grand-nephew represent his extended family then and now. Eakins accepted Tanner despite the racial attitudes of the time and challenged him to develop his gifts. One of Eakins’ assignments for Tanner was to go to the Philadelphia Zoo and paint the animals there, which led to the early work Pomp at the Zoo, starring the lion known as “Pompeii” or “Pomp.” “[T]he thing… that always impressed me is that it’s not just a lion,” Lewis Tanner Moore, the painting’s owner and Henry’s descendant, remarks, “ It’s very clearly written on the plaque ‘African Lion.’” Refusing to be caged in by racism, Tanner roared with the ferociousness of a lion through the power in his painting.

The fact that most people who know anything about Tanner know him through his depictions of African-American life in The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor is a great misrepresentation of who he was as an artist. Yes, Tanner painted those works to counter racist depictions of African-Americans and as part of his own fascination with the dynamics of learning and mentorship, but the Tanner known in his day (and who will now be known in our own, thanks to this exhibition) was the painter of deeply felt and magnificently rendered religious scenes.

Tanner’s The Resurrection of Lazarus (shown above, from 1896) launched Henry’s career as an international figure. Lazarus earned a third-class medal in the Paris Salon of 1897 and was soon purchased by the French state, setting off a firestorm of media attention in Europe and America. The department store magnate Rodman Wanamaker fell in love with the painting and offered Tanner his patronage, which cemented Henry’s success and allowed him to travel and broaden his cultural and artistic horizons. The painting, which appears in America for the first time in this exhibition, depicts the Bible story of Jesus raising his friend Lazarus from the dead. Lazarus and his shroud stretching across the foreground of the work and Jesus summoning him to life draw the eye initially, and rightfully so. But closer inspection reveals the Tanner’s ability to register different expressions of awe on the faces of the witnesses that occupy the majority of the canvas. “Hidden” in plain sight, a dark-skinned African figure stands among the crowd, perhaps to suggest the African presence in Christianity, as the catalog suggests, one that Tanner knew first hand from his religious upbringing and also knew was cruelly underestimated.