The angular austerity of Whistler's composition hints at the Protestant streak in his mother's mettle. Still, stress is on the figure as a structural element, one abstract form in play with others. Tanner, by contrast, recasts the composition and lighting to create a tender cameo of a reflective woman in reverie. Her meditative mood infuses the darksome composition, punctuated by soft light, with a gravity greater than the sum of formal arrangements. Viewers have no doubt that the subject of the painting is the inwardness of the sitter, not the devices of picture-making.
The Thankful Poor (Fig. 4) and The Banjo Lesson (Fig. 5) represent the kind of black genre painting initially expected from Tanner. In the former, a man and a boy, presumably a grandson, both black, sit at a table with their heads bowed to say grace over their meal. Race here is incidental to rituals rooted in the larger culture. Tanner's audience would have recognized the subject's affinity with the renowned L'Angélus of 1857 to 1859 (Musée d'Orsay, Paris) by Jean-François Millet (1814-1895) or La Bénédicité of 1740 (Musée du Louvre) by Jean-Baptiste-Simeon Chardin (1699-1779). Piety and thanksgiving observe no color line.
A good detective might want to know if Norman Rockwell (1894-1978), an inspired scavenger through the art historical bin, was familiar with the widely popular The Thankful Poor. Rockwell's own best loved Saturday Evening Post cover was Saying Grace (November 24, 1951). Here again are the generations-the boy accompanied by a grandmother this time—joined in the same gesture of gratitude over a simple meal in a railroad station diner. Rockwell, like Tanner, places his familial couple in front of a curtained window. While the emotional tenor is the polar opposite of Tanner's, the pictorial core is intriguingly similar. Rockwell's familiar pair draw amused curiosity from fellow diners—sly surrogates for the culture at large—unaccustomed to displays of piety. Tanner's depiction takes audience intimacy with mealtime for granted. Yet in both, the reverence of the praying couple is the unaffected heart of the motif.
Emphasis on the transmission of culture to the young is a constant in Tanner's figurative work. His most famous painting, The Banjo Lesson, follows the lead of Winslow Homer (1836-1910) and Eakins in depicting black subjects as individuals rather than stereotypes. At the same time Tanner's depiction of an older black man tutoring an adolescent boy, each absorbed in the drill, is of a piece with the paintings he did in this period using Breton subjects: The Young Sabot Maker of 1895 (Nelson-Atkins Museum, Kansas City, Missouri) and The Bagpipe Lesson of 1892-1893 (Hampton University Museum, Virginia). The theme also threads through such later paintings as Christ Learning to Read of 1911-1914 (Des Moines Art Center, Iowa).
Pickle Dish, American China Manufactory (Bonnin and Morris), Philadelphia, 1771-72. Soft-paste porcelain with lead glaze; height 4 3/16, width 4 1/2
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