In celebration of that spirit, the Philadelphia Museum of Art will host a major retrospective of Tanner's work starting Jan. 20. The exhibit will be on display through April 14, then travel to the Detroit Institute of Arts, Atlanta's High Museum of Art and the Fine Arts Museum of San Francisco.
 

Stretching from Tanner's student days, when he painted seascapes and animals, to his late religious works, this retrospective is the most expansive of the five held since his death in 1937. It also marks the first time the Philadelphia Museum of Art has mounted a major retrospective of a black artist.
 

"We have shown and collected work by African-American artists for many years, but this is the first one-man show we have organized for a national tour," said Robert Montgomery Scott, Art Museum president. "I personally find Tanner's work both poignant and uplifting and look forward to seeing it repeatedly while it is here." Featured are more than 90 paintings and 15
drawings borrowed from public and private collections throughout the United States and France, including those of Bill Cosby, Tanner's family and the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. Hampton, Clark-Atlanta and Howard universities also contributed pieces.
 

Organizers hope that the retrospective - funded with $500,000 from the Ford Motor Co., along with money from the Pew Charitable Trusts, the National Endowment for the Arts and the William Penn Foundation, will bring larger audiences to the man many call America's greatest African-American painter.

 
    This quiet, reserved revolutionary broke down barriers as one of the first academically trained African-American painters and one of the first permanent expatriates. His success encouraged younger black artists like Aaron Douglas, Hale Woodruff, Meta Warrick Fuller and Romare Bearden - leaders in the Harlem Renaissance, the Depression-era artistic revolution.

    "To have done what he has accomplished against extraordinary odds in this society and to be as brilliant as he was ... that to me is just remarkable," said Rae Alexander-Minter, Tanner's great grandniece, who is public programs director at the New-York Historical Society.

    Tanner's path crossed continents, spanned artistic traditions and cultures. It began in Pittsburgh, where he was born June 21, 1859.

    His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was an African Methodist Episcopalian minister and social activist who bestowed upon his first-born an unusual middle name to honor Osawatomie, the Kansas town where-white abolitionist John Brown launched his anti-slavery campaign.

    In 1866, when Tanner was 7, the family moved to Philadelphia, which boasted one of the largest urban black populations at the time, as well as a sizable black middle class. Their first home was at 3rd and Pine streets. As the family grew, the Tanners settled into a larger house at 2908 Diamond St.

    Philadelphia, where Tanner spent 25 years, offered him much nourishment. The 1876 Centennial Exhibition held in the city featured the works of African-American sculptor Edmonia Lewis and painter Edward Mitchell Bannister.

    And Tanner feasted on the art museums and galleries. "After school, I would often go down on Chestnut Street, to see the pictures in Earle's Galleries," he recalled in 1909. "After drinking my fill of these art wonders, l would hurry home and paint what I had seen, and what fun it was."

    Tanner's mother made a palette for her young son and bought paints out of her household money.

    Even though artistic life held little promise for Tanner, he persevered, and at age 21 entered the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study under Thomas Eakins.

    Eakins, the controversial artist who became a lifelong friend. used photographs and anatomical study to teach his students to paint exact images. Tanner kept those meticulous habits throughout his career, even as his painting style moved from Eakins' realism toward a looser, color-oriented technique.

    "The training was pretty rigorous," said Elizabeth Johns, an Eakins scholar at the University of Pennsylvania. "They had to understand laws of perspective and draw from casts and from life, so that Tanner was capable of modeling convincing humans."

    Those careful habits meant Tanner never produced more than 30 paintings a year, said Darrel Sewell, curator of American Art at the Philadelphia Museum of Art and of the exhibit. "He didn't make paintings spontaneously. He wasn't like the impressionists who went out on a field and painted. For him, a painting was a constructed thing."

    After two years at the Pennsylvania Academy, Tanner left to establish himself as a painter. He sold illustrations -and exhibited his work at the school and at the National Academy of Design in New York. In 1888, he opened a photography studio and taught drawing in Atlanta.
 
    In 1891, Tanner sailed for Europe, which appealed in part because of its romantic allure and its position in the minds of American artists as the ultimate proving ground.

    But Tanner also was leaving an America increasingly hostile toward blacks. Civil rights granted with the Emancipation Proclamation were attacked and the Ku Klux Klan and other hate groups began rising in earnest.

    Alexander-Minter said Tanner decided to leave for Europe after he was taunted in a small Pennsylvania town where he had moved to paint. "He said he couldn't go on painting there. It was too uncomfortable. He could not paint in an atmosphere where he was not accepted," Alexander-Minter said.

    Tanner seemed to find peace in France. He studied at the Academie Julien, furthering his training in precise painting. But his pleasant European interlude ground to a halt two years later when he developed tuberculosis, forcing his return to the United States.

    Sick and broke, Tanner still managed to paint his most beloved works, "The Banjo Lesson" and "The Thankful Poor," two gentle depictions of life among American blacks. With those paintings, Tanner paid homage to the social activism of his father, who had worked variously as a journal editor and teacher at a freedman's school.
 
    "He was saying to his father, I can make positive statements just like you can," said art historian Naurice F. Woods. "You preach from the pulpit. As an artist, I can too."

    "'The Banjo Lesson" (1893) proved to be particularly popular. Indeed, educator Booker T. Washington encouraged black Americans to buy reproductions of the painting.

    Along with its gentleness, the painting offers a stern response to the mocking stereotypes of blacks so popular at the time. With a banjo and an elderly black man, Tanner transformed the minstrel tradition into an instrument of racial pride.

    "Maybe Tanner is trying to say this is the way it's supposed to be," said Woods. "This man is not a minstrel. He's sharing African traditions he's proud of."

    Yearning again for the open racial climate of France, Tanner returned to Europe in 1894. He left America and the field of black genre paintings. Some art historians say he abandoned that topic because there were too few buyers of such paintings. Others argue that he felt unable to paint such American scenes from faraway France.

    In 1894, Tanner began to receive the critical attention he long sought. The prestigious art salon, Societe des Artists Francais, accepted "The Music Lesson" for exhibition. In 1896, "Daniel in the Lion's Den" received an honorable mention at the salon.  Another salon-exhibited work, "The Resurrection of Lazarus" (1897), so impressed Rodman Wanamaker that the son of legendary Philadelphia retailer John Wanamaker sponsored Tanner's first trip (and a subsequent one) to the Holy Land.

    That 1897 visit marked Tanner's turn toward religious subjects. With his stripped-down figures and special attention to lighting and color, familiar Biblical scenes became expressions of an intensely personal mysticism.

    In 1899, Tanner married Jessie Macauley Olssen, a white singer from San Francisco who had been a model for his 1898 painting "The Innunciation." They married in London and settled in France, where they raised their son, Jesse.

    Tanner's fortunes rose substantially at the turn of the century., with a succession of honors and exhibits. He continued to exhibit at the Salon of the Societe des Artistes Francais, but also held shows throughout the United States. In 1909, he was elected to the National Academy. He also received the Legion of Honor from the French government in 1923, the country's highest
civilian award.

    But World War I shattered Tanner's domestic peace. He left painting temporarily to drive an ambulance in war torn France.  His wife died in 1925 in her sleep and his son suffered a nervous breakdown soon after.

    He resumed his painting, but success was hobbled by increasing health problems, the economic pinch of the Depression and the modern styles sweeping Europe and America. Tanner died peacefully in his sleep May 25, 1937, at age 78, in his Paris apartment.