In this series, the curatorial team presents one work from the Meural art library we find essential. (See all installments.)

This week, with Black History Month in mind, I took some time to explore the work of three trailblazing African American artists working in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

Robert S. Duncanson should, by any measure, be a household name—as celebrated as any other titan of American landscape painting, like Frederic Edwin Church and Thomas Cole. But despite achieving success and recognition in his own time, Duncanson was, sadly and unfairly, largely forgotten from art history, until he was ‘rediscovered’ some 50 years ago. What I love so much about this particular painting is how Duncanson depicts a scene of human daring, but chooses to minimize it in favor of highlighting nature’s majesty. Blink and you’d miss the man robbing the eagle’s nest at the centre of the painting.

Henry Ossawa Tanner was a favorite student of Thomas Eakins (under whom he studied at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) who went on to achieve significant international acclaim. I’ve been particularly struck by his way with light, so delightfully on display in this portrait of Paris’ famous waterway.

In 1876, Edward Mitchell Bannister won a medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition for his painting Under the Oaks. The judges wanted to take away the award when they discovered he was black—he recalled that “an explosion could not have created more of a sensation in that room.” However his white competitors upheld the decision and Bannister was recognized as the honoree. I haven’t been able to find the painting in question, but wondered if this pleasant scene was similar to the Bannister’s award-winning work.

— Poppy Simpson, Head of Curation