American Art Collaborative

Turning away from the sharp-edged realism that characterized much earlier art made in the United States, elite American audiences in the last three decades of the 19th-century began to favor landscapes that were atmospheric and evocative rather than descriptive. By 1877, when Edward Mitchell Bannister painted this small oil sketch, the taste for “poetic” landscape painting was already well established. New England artists in particular, following the lead of the Boston artist William Morris Hunt, sought to stimulate viewers’ emotions and imaginations through their work. The French painters Jean-Francois Millet, Jules Breton, and Jean-Baptiste Camille Corot exerted a profound influence on these artists, who are sometimes referred to collectively as the American Barbizon School. Within this group, Bannister is distinguished not only by his mastery of the Barbizon style, but by his position as a professional African American artist working in the United States—a rare achievement in the racist climate of the late-19th-century American art world. Bannister, who was born in New Brunswick, Canada, moved to Boston in 1848, when he was 20 years old. Nine years later, through his marriage to the wealthy and cultured businesswoman Christiana Carteaux, Bannister became a member of New England’s small black elite class. He quickly immersed himself in the cultural life of Boston. By the mid-1860s, he was experimenting with photography and studying drawing and painting under William Rimmer at the Lowell Institute. In 1870, Bannister moved with his wife to Providence, Rhode Island, and there he opened a studio as a professional painter. After his landscape Under the Oaks (now lost) won a bronze medal at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia, Bannister’s artistic reputation was assured. Painted just a year after his triumph in Philadelphia, Bannister’s oil sketch is typical of his landscapes of the late 1870s. Painted quickly but deftly on a small panel, it depicts cattle drinking placidly from a pond in the foreground, under a cloudy, blue summer sky. The lengthening shadows of the trees in the verdant middle ground and a hint of yellow along the horizon indicate the onset of evening, and smoke rising from a distant chimney suggests that hearth and supper await the lone boy, who stands watch over his cows. Filled with golden sunlight and hazy atmosphere, which shrouds the distant blue hills, the painting evokes reverie and nostalgia for a simpler past. Hung in innumerable late-19th-century American parlors and studies, American Barbizon paintings harmonized with the popular Aesthetic-movement décor of the period while preaching the simple values of rural life and a love of hearth and home. According to a handwritten note on the back of the museum’s oil sketch, Bannister gave this particular painting to the Providence art supplier Charles Caulder as a housewarming gift.Lauren Lessing