Edward Mitchell Bannister

Edward Mitchell Bannister
Born	(1828-11-02)November 2, 1828 Saint Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada
Died	January 9, 1901(1901-01-09) (aged 72) Providence, Rhode Island, U.S.
Resting place	North Burial Ground
Nationality	Canadian, American
Other names	Edwin, Ned
Education	Lowell Institute
Style	Tonalism
Spouse	Christiana Carteaux Bannister
Awards	First Prize Philadelphia Centennial 1876 Under the Oaks

Edward Mitchell Bannister (November 2, 1828 – January 9, 1901) was an American Tonalist oil painter. Born in Canada, he spent his adult life in New England, where he was a prominent member of African American cultural and political communities. He joined Boston's abolition movement and was a founding member of the Providence Art Club.

Bannister's style and predominantly pastoral subject matter reflected his admiration for the French artist Jean-François Millet and the French Barbizon School. A life-long sailor, he also looked to the Rhode Island seaside for inspiration. Bannister continually experimented in his artistic practice, and his artwork is noted for its connection to Idealist philosophies and his masterful control of color and atmosphere. He began his professional practice as a photographer and portraitist before developing his more well-known landscape style.

Biography

Early life

Bannister was born on November 2, 1828, in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, near the St. Croix River, to possibly Barbadian parents. His father Edward Bannister died in 1832, so Edward and his younger brother William were raised by their mother, Hannah Alexander Bannister. Early on, Bannister was apprenticed to a cobbler, but his drawing skill was already noted among his friends and family. Bannister credited his mother with igniting his early interest in art. She died in 1844, after which Bannister and his brother lived on the farm of the wealthy lawyer and merchant Harris Hatch. There, he practiced drawing by studying and reproducing two Hatch family portraits, as well as studying the family library and Bible.

Bannister and his brother found work aboard ships as mates and cooks for several months before immigrating to Boston sometime in the late 1840s. In the 1850 US census, they are listed as living at the same boarding house, with the Revaleon family, and working as barbers. The brothers' role as barbers and status as mixed race gave them relatively high standing as middle-class professionals within Boston.

Although he aspired to work as a painter, Bannister had difficulty finding an apprenticeship or academic programs that would accept him, likely due to racial prejudice. At the time, Boston was an abolitionist stronghold, but it was also sharply divided by race; in 1860, Boston was one of the most segregated cities in the US. Bannister would later express his frustration with being blocked from artistic education: "Whatever may be my success as an artist is due more to inherited potential than to instruction" and "All I would do I cannot ... simply for the want of proper training."

Masthead of The Liberator, 1861

Bannister received his first oil painting commission, The Ship Outward Bound, in 1854 from an African American doctor, John V. DeGrasse. Bannister's colleague, Jacob R. Andrews, created the commission's gilt frame. DeGrasse later commissioned Bannister to paint portraits of him and his wife. Patronage like DeGrasse's was critical to Bannister's early career, as the African American community wanted to support and highlight its contributions to high culture. African Americans found portraiture an "ideal medium" for expressing their freedom and opportunity, which is likely why Bannister's earliest commissions are mostly within that genre.

Through abolitionist newspapers like The Anglo-African and The Liberator and the writings of Martin R. Delany, Bannister likely learned about other African American artists like Robert S. Duncanson, James Presley Ball, Patrick H. Reason, and David Bustill Bowser. Their work would have made Bannister's ambition seem all the more possible. Although most cultural institutions barred Black Bostonians from entrance, Bannister would have had access to several, like the Boston Athenæum library, with collections of European art sources and exhibitions of Luminist marine painters like Robert Salmon and Fitz Hugh Lane.

Boston activist, artist, and student

Portrait of Christiana Carteaux Bannister, Edward Mitchell Bannister, c. 1860

Bannister met Christiana Carteaux in 1853 when he applied to be a barber in her salon. Both were members of Boston's diverse abolitionist movement, and barbershops were important meeting places for African American abolitionists. They married on June 10, 1857, and she became, in effect, his most important patron. The couple boarded for two years with Lewis Hayden and Harriet Bell Hayden at 66 Southac Street, a stop on Boston's Underground Railroad (a support network for escaped slaves).

In 1855, William Cooper Nell acknowledged Bannister's rising artistic status in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution for his The Ship Outward Bound. By 1858, Bannister was listed as an artist in Boston's city directory. Around 1862, he spent a year training in photography in New York, likely to support his painting practice, He then found work as a photographer, taking solar plates and tinting photos. One of Bannister's earliest commissioned portraits was of Prudence Nelson Bell in 1864, which is around when he found studio space at the Studio Building in Boston. At the Studio Building, he came into contact with other prominent artists, like Elihu Vedder and John La Farge. Once Bannister was established as an artist, abolitionist William Wells Brown praised Bannister in his 1865 book:

"Mr. Bannister possesses genius, which is now showing itself in his studio in Boston; for he has long since thrown aside the scissors and the comb, and transfers the face to the canvas, instead of taking the hair from the head. [...] Mr. Bannister is spare-made, slim, with an interesting cast of countenance, quick in his walk, and easy in his manners. He is a lover of poetry and the classics, and is always hunting up some new model for his gifted pencil and brush."

Bannister was part of Boston's African American artistic community, which included Edmonia Lewis, William H. Simpson, and Nelson A. Primus. He sang a tenor in the Crispus Attucks Choir, which performed anti-slavery songs at public events, and acted with The Histrionic Club, as well as serving as a delegate for the New England Colored Citizens Conventions in August 1859 and 1865. His name also appears on several public petitions published in The Liberator.

The Twelfth Baptist Church, where Bannister and Carteaux were members

Bannister and Carteaux were devout members of the militant abolitionist Twelfth Baptist Church, located on Southac Street near their home at the Hayden House. In May 1859, Bannister served as the secretary for the church's meetings to respond to the Oberlin–Wellington Rescue of imprisoned fugitive slaves and, in 1863, to plan celebrations for the Emancipation Proclamation.

During the US Civil War, Carteaux lobbied for equal pay for African American soldiers and organized the 1864 soldiers’ relief fair for the Massachusetts 54th infantry regiment, 55th infantry regiment, and 5th cavalry regiment, which had gone without pay for over a year and a half. Bannister donated his full-length portrait of Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the 54th killed in action, to raise money for the cause.

The Bannister portrait of Robert Gould Shaw was one of several reclamations of Gould Shaw by members of Boston's African American artistic community such as Edmonia Lewis, despite Gould Shaw's Boston Brahmin background. It was displayed with the label "Our Martyr". The portrait was praised in the New York Weekly Anglo-African as "a fine specimen of art" and inspired a poem by Martha Perry Lowe entitled The Picture of Col. Shaw in Boston. The portrait's paternalistic praise from Lowe and Lydia Maria Child exemplified the divide between Boston's white abolitionists and the African American community. The painting was purchased by the state of Massachusetts and installed in its state house, but its current location is unknown.

Bannister's activism also took other forms: on June 17, 1865, Bannister marshaled around 200 members of the Twelfth Baptist Sunday School at a Grand Temperance Celebration on Boston Common. They marched under a banner reading "Equal rights for all men".

Bannister eventually studied at the Lowell Institute with the artist William Rimmer for about a year. Because of his daytime photography business, he mostly took his drawing classes at night. Through Rimmer and the community at the Studio Building, Bannister was inspired by the Barbizon school-influenced paintings of William Morris Hunt, who had studied in Europe and held numerous public exhibitions in Boston around the 1860s. He also formed a temporary painting partnership with Asa R. Lewis that lasted from 1868 to 1869. During that partnership of "Bannister & Lewis", Bannister began to advertise himself as both a portrait and landscape painter.

Despite his early commissions, Bannister still struggled to receive wider recognition for his work due to racism in the US. Following emancipation and the end of the US Civil War, the abolitionists began to disperse and, with them, their patronage. Due to increasing competition, Bannister did little to support Nelson A. Primus, who had come to him seeking an apprenticeship. An 1867 article in the New York Herald belittled both Bannister and his work, stating, "the negro has an appreciation for art while being manifestly unable to produce it". The article reportedly spurred his desire to achieve success as an artist. At the same time, Bannister had begun to receive more recognition within white art circles in Boston.

Providence

Painting completed around the time of Under the Oaks and thought to resemble its composition. Oak Trees, oil on canvas, 1876

Facade of the Seril Dodge House at left, where the Providence Art Club was first permanently located, in 1934

Supported by Carteaux, Bannister became a full-time painter from 1870 on, shortly after they moved to Providence, Rhode Island, at the end of 1869. He first took a studio in the Mercantile National Bank Building and eventually moved his studio to the Woods Building in Providence, where he shared a floor with artists like Sydney Burleigh and became friends with Providence painter George William Whitaker. Over time, he painted more landscapes; he received an 1872 award at the Rhode Island Industrial Exposition for Summer Afternoon and began submitting paintings to the Boston Art Club.

Bannister finally received national commendation for his work when he won first prize for his large oil Under the Oaks at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial. Even then, the judge wanted to rescind the award after learning his identity until other exhibition artists protested; afterwards, Bannister reflected: "I was and am proud to know that the jury of award did not know anything about me, my antecedents, color or race. There was no sentimental sympathy leading to the award of the medal." Bannister had intentionally submitted his painting with only a signature attached to ensure he would be judged fairly. As his career matured, he received more commissions and accumulated many honors, several from the Massachusetts Charitable Mechanics Association (silver medals in 1881 and 1884). Collectors and local notables Isaac Comstock Bates and Joseph Ely were among his patrons.

He was an original board member of the Rhode Island School of Design in 1878. In 1880, Bannister joined with other professional artists, amateurs, and art collectors to found the Providence Art Club to stimulate the appreciation of art in the community. Their first meeting was in Bannister's studio in the Woods Building at the bottom of College Hill. He was the second to sign the club's charter, served on its initial executive board, and taught regular Saturday art classes. He continued to show paintings at Boston Art Club exhibitions, as well as in Connecticut and at New York's National Academy of Design, and exhibited A New England Hillside at the New Orleans Cotton Exposition in 1885. There, Bannister's work was segregated and ignored by the judging committees. With that experience in mind, Bannister decided not to submit any works to the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition since they would have to be pre-judged in Boston before they could even be sent to Chicago.

Edward Bannister painting the USS Richmond, Newport Historical Society, c. 1887

In the 1880s, Bannister bought a small sloop sailboat, the Fanchon, and he would spend his summers sketching, painting watercolors, and sailing Narragansett Bay and up to Bar Harbor in Maine. He would return with his studies and use them as the basis for winter commissions. He supplemented his sailing trips with journeys to exhibitions in New York, but a planned trip to Europe fell through due to funding problems. In 1885, with other art club members, Bannister helped found the "Anne Eliza Club" (or "A&E Club")—a communal men's discussion group whose members shared art and literature. Through his teaching there and at the Providence Art Club, he became a mentor to younger Providence artists, like Charles Walter Stetson. Stetson often mentioned Bannister in his personal diaries and once praised Bannister by writing, "He is my only confidant in Art matters & I am his." Rhode Island engineer George Henry Corliss commissioned a painting from Bannister in 1886, as his reputation grew.

Bannister and Carteaux were consistent members of the African American community in Providence. They lived for a time in the boarding house of Ransom Parker, who had participated in the Dorr Rebellion, and were friends with merchant George Henry, Reverend Mahlon Van Horne, Brown graduate John Hope, and abolitionist George T. Downing, an ally from the Bannisters' political work in Boston. Carteaux founded the Home for Aged Colored Women, which is known as the Bannister Center today. Edward exhibited his painting Christ Healing the Sick in the home in 1892 and donated his portrait of Carteaux to it as well. Bannister's abolitionism likely led to conflict with the mostly white members of the Providence Art Club, which exhibited art with minstrel stereotypes by E. W. Kemble and W. L. Shephard in 1887 and 1893.

Sometime around 1890, Bannister sold the Fanchon to Judge George Newman Bliss. His largest exhibition of works was held in 1891, when he showed 33 works at the Spring Providence Art Club Exhibition. Later in the 1890s, Bannister seems to have sold fewer paintings, perhaps due to waning popularity, and exhibited less often. In 1898, Bannister closed his studio and the couple moved to Boston for a year before returning to a smaller home in Providence on Wilson Street in 1900.

Death

Bannister died of a heart attack on January 9, 1901, while attending an evening prayer meeting at his church, Elmwood Avenue Free Baptist Church. He had experienced heart trouble for some time but had completed two paintings only the previous day. During the service, he offered a prayer and shortly after sat down, gasping. His last words were reportedly "Jesus, help me."

After his death, the Providence Art Club held a memorial exhibition in his name that focused on his artistic achievements, without mentioning his contribution to abolitionism. In the exhibition pamphlet, they wrote that "His gentle disposition, his urbanity of manner, and his generous appreciation of the work of others, made him a welcome guest in all artistic circles. [...] He painted with profound feeling, not for pecuniary results, but to leave upon the canvas his impression of natural scenery, and to express his delight in the wondrous beauty of land and sea and sky."

He is buried in the North Burial Ground in Providence, under a stone monument designed by his art club friends. The disparity between Bannister's financial difficulties at the end of his life and the support shown by Providence's artists after his death led one friend to say about the memorial: "In the labor incident to this work I was constantly reminded of the remark attributed to the mother of Robert Burns on being shown the splendid monument erected to the memory of her gifted son: 'He asked for bread and they gave him a stone.'"

Carteaux was admitted to her Home for Aged Colored Women in 1902 and died in 1903 in a mental institution. She and Bannister are buried together.

Artistic style

Approaching Storm, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1886, oil on canvas, 102.2 cm x 152.4 cm

Bannister is primarily known for his idealized landscapes and seascapes, but he also executed portraits, as well as biblical, mythological, and genre scenes. He advertised himself as a portraitist as a young painter, but eventually became popular for his landscapes. An intellectual autodidact, his tastes in literature were typical of an educated Victorian painter, including Spenser, Virgil, Ruskin, and Tennyson, from whose works much of his iconography can be traced. Much like George Inness, 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 the Hudson River School style, Bannister did not create meticulous landscapes but paid more attention to creating "generalized masses defined by light and shadow" and works that were more picturesque than sublime. Bannister also avoided the "nationalist grandeur" often found Hudson River School paintings.

Boston Street Scene (Boston Common), (1898–99). The Walters Art Museum.

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. His paintings are known for their delicate use of color to depict shadow and atmosphere and their loose brushwork. His later palette exhibited brighter, but 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.

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. In the lecture The Artist and His Critics given to the Ann 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 made explicit reference to the works of American Transcendentalist Washington Allston. Bannister's friend George W. Whitaker even referred to him as "The Idealist" in a 1914 article "Reminiscences of Providence Artists." The lecture and its idealistic view are linked to Bannister's Approaching Storm, 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. 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. In one work, Hay Gatherers, Bannister depicts African American field laborers that combines his rural landscapes with a representation of the racial oppression and labor exploitation that marked Rhode Island, particularly in South County, where most of the state's plantations once were. Through the geometric composition of the painting, which divides the figures and the landscapes into triangular sections, he combined a seemingly idealized landscape with his early political practice, visible in his humanist portraits such as Newspaper Boy.

Hay Gatherers, Edward Mitchell Bannister, c. 1893

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 clear reminder of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. 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. Similarly, his Governor Sprague's White Horse depicted the horse that William Sprague IV rode into the First Battle of Bull Run.

He has, however, been criticized for not often directly representing African Americans, outside of his early portraiture. Bannister's art subtly dismantled racial stereotypes, but many of his works consisted of commissioned landscapes and portraits that reinforced European ideas. In that way, Bannister has been compared to later Bostonian poet William Stanley Braithwaite, whose writing did not clearly reflect his identity. Art historian Juanita Marie Holland believes that 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. Holland wrote of Bannister's dilemma: "This was a large part of the double blind 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."

Legacy

Bannister was the only major African American artist of the late nineteenth century who developed his talents without European exposure; and he was well known in the artistic community of Providence and admired within the wider East Coast art world. After his death, Bannister was largely forgotten by art history for almost a century, principally due to racial prejudice. Still, he and his paintings are an indelible part of a refigured relationship between African American culture and the landscapes of Reconstruction-era America.

Bannister's art continued to be supported by galleries like the Barnett-Aden Gallery, and following the civil rights movement in the 1960s, his work was again celebrated and widely collected. In collaboration with the Rhode Island School of Design and the Frederick Douglass Institute, the National Museum of African Art held an exhibition titled Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901: Providence Artist in 1973. The Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame inducted Bannister in 1976, and, in 1978, Rhode Island College dedicated its Art Gallery in Bannister's name with the exhibition: Four From Providence: Alston, Bannister, Jennings & Prophet.

The New York-based Kenkebala Gallery held two exhibitions of Bannister's work, one in 1992 curated by Corrinne Jennings in collaboration with the Whitney and one in 2001 on the centennial of Bannister's death. From June 9 to October 8, 2018, the Gilbert Stuart Museum held an exhibition honoring Bannister and Carteaux's relationship, "My Greatest Successes Have Come Through Her": The Artistic Partnership of Edward and Christiana Bannister, as part of its Rhode Island Masters exhibition series. Bannister's portrait of Christiana Carteaux was the center of the exhibition.

In September 2017, a Providence City Council committee unanimously voted to rename Magee Street (which had been named after a Rhode Island slave trader) to Bannister Street, in honor of Edward and Christiana Bannister.

The historian Anne Louise Avery is currently compiling the first catalogue raisonné and a major biography of Bannister's work.

House

In 1884, Bannister and Carteaux moved from the boarding house of Ransom Parker to 93 Benevolent Street, and lived there until 1899. The two-and-a-half-story wooden house was built circa 1854 by engineer Charles E. Paine and is now known as "The Vault" or "The Bannister House." Euchlin Reeves and Louise Herreshoff purchased the house in the late 1930s and renovated it to add a brick exterior. The renovation was made to create consistency with their next-door property, so both houses could hold their "little museum" of antiques. Herreshoff died in 1967 and the porcelain collection filling the Bannister House was donated to Washington and Lee University.

The house is now listed as contributing to College Hill's historical designation. Brown University bought the property in 1989 and used it to store refrigerators. Due to a lack of plans for its preservation and use, the Providence Preservation Society put the Bannister House on its 2001 list of most endangered buildings in Providence, Brown University president Ruth Simmons assured historian and former Rhode Island deputy secretary of state Ray Rickman that the house would be preserved, although the university debated whether to sell the house to a third party.

Because its disrepair and long disuse made the house unsuitable for residence, Brown renovated the property in 2015 and restored it to its original appearance. It was sold to Professor Jeff Huang in 2016 as part of the Brown to Brown Home Ownership Program—the program specifies that if the house is ever sold, it has to be sold back to the university.

Selected artworks

• 
  Newspaper Boy, 1869, oil on canvas, Smithsonian American Art Museum
• 
  Governor Sprague's White Horse, 1869, oil on canvas, Rhode Island Historical Society
• 
  Driving Home the Cows, 1881, Smithsonian American Art Museum
• 
  River Scene, 1883, oil on canvas, Honolulu Museum of Art
• 
  Palmer River, 1885, oil on canvas, private collection
• 
  The Woodsman, 1885, graphite, Providence Art Club
• 
  Untitled, c. 1885, Brooklyn Museum
• 
  Neutakonkanut, 1891, watercolor, Smithsonian American Art Museum

Further reading

• Edward M. Bannister: A Centennial Retrospective. Newport, R.I.: Roger King Gallery of Fine Art. 2001. OCLC 49568395.
• Bearden, Romare; Henderson, Harry (1993). A History of African American Artists from 1792 to the Present. Pantheon. ISBN 9780394570167. OCLC 799475571.
• Driskell, David C. (1976). Two centuries of Black American art. Los Angeles County Museum of Art. ISBN 9780394408873. OCLC 2318292.
• Hartigan, Lynda Roscoe (1985). Sharing Traditions: 5 Black Artists in 19th-Century America. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution. pp. 69–82. OCLC 28282837.
• Perry, Regenia A. (1992). Free Within Ourselves: African American Artists in the Collection of the National Museum of American Art. Smithsonian. pp. 23–27. ISBN 9781566400725. OCLC 496560713.
• Van Siclen, Bill (November 1, 2001). "The Varied Landscape of Edward Bannister's Career". The Providence Journal.

External links

• Edward Mitchell Bannister at American Art Gallery
• Biographical sketch and images at World Wide Art Resources
• Narratives of Art and Identity: The David C. Driskell Collection