George Anthony Morton, artist featured in the HBO film ‘Master of Light,’ leads Philly mural featuring Henry O. Tanner’s ‘The Thankful Poor’

Not long after his release from federal prison, George Anthony Morton, an artist in Atlanta, began his pursuit of Henry Ossawa Tanner.

Morton, whose complicated life story is told in the HBO documentary Master of Light, was in Philadelphia this month to work on a mural of Tanner’s The Thankful Poor at Mural Arts’ studio at the Painted Bride Art Center in West Philadelphia.

On Sunday, he returned for a “community paint day” that Mural Arts hosted for neighborhood people to help complete it. The nearly 70-by-39-foot mural is going on a wall of the Gethsemane F.B.H. Church at 29th and Dauphin Streets.

The church is not far from the Tanner House, at 2908 W. Diamond St., where Tanner, the first Black American artist to achieve international acclaim, lived with his family.

“The community that mural is going in isn’t the best neighborhood,” Morton told The Inquirer. “But this is a slice of light this mural will provide to anybody who’s paying attention.

“What I’m hoping for is that children in that neighborhood can see it as they are walking to school, or going to the bus stop, and what it could mean for them to know that a great artist like Tanner once lived in this community.”

The Tanner mural comes at a time when the Friends of the Tanner House is working to preserve Tanner’s childhood home, which had been cited by the city for building violations.

In a case of serendipity, Cathy Harris, the Mural Arts project manager, said she had no idea that among Tanner’s religious paintings is one called The Sleeping Disciples — Christ in the Garden of Gethsemane.

“I was doing wall hunting, because years before, we had talked about doing a mural there,” Harris said. “But I never knew about that particular painting.”

This will be Mural Arts’ second Tanner mural. In 2018, Henry Ossawa Tanner: Letters of Influence by Philadelphia artist Keir Johnston was completed at 2019 College Ave. But North Philadelphia community leader Judith Robinson said she proposed a new Tanner mural that would be closer to the artist’s former home.

» READ MORE: Once ‘the center of the Black intellectual community in Philadelphia,’ the Henry O. Tanner House could be demolished

The Thankful Poor (1894) is one of two Tanner paintings showing domestic life of African Americans, depicting an elderly Black man teaching or praying with a young child, perhaps a grandson.

The other is The Banjo Lesson (1893) in which the grandfather figure teaches a child how to play that instrument. But Tanner gained critical acclaim for his religious genre paintings, such as The Annunciation (1898) and The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896).

“The Thankful Poor is a legitimate masterpiece, and I’m not just interested in it because it has a Black subject matter,” Morton said. “It’s very impressionistic and his mark-making is very calligraphic and beautiful.

“What makes it a masterpiece, next to its composition and design, was how he was subverting a genre with an image that dignified a community at a time when all the images were caricaturing Black people.”

During the summer, Morton traveled to the Akron Art Museum in Ohio to see Tanner’s original The Thankful Poor, where it was on loan from the Crystal Bridges Museum of Art in Arkansas — copying and studying it and sending notes to Philadelphia artists Efrain Herrerea and Kien Nguyen, whom Mural Arts hired to work on the mural.

After Ohio, The Thankful Poor went to New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, where it is currently on exhibit. In the last several weeks, Morton followed it to New York and continued to study it there.

The HBO documentary makes much of Morton’s appreciation of Rembrandt, known for his mastery of light and shadow. Now, Morton is turning his attention to a new film about Tanner. It will be called Flight into Egypt, after a Tanner painting.

Both Morton and Tanner (1859-1937) were strongly influenced by Rembrandt and other Dutch painters known as “Masters of Light.”

Tanner once said of Rembrandt’s art: “Dark and light areas help create the drama, which one can feel and sense.” And Morton talks about how “beauty can be shown in dark moments.”

Like Tanner’s, Morton’s portraits capture the contrast of light and dark: A glowing light illuminates the central figure surrounded by opaque darkness.

The award-winning Master of Light film focuses on Morton’s quest to study Rembrandt’s work in Amsterdam, while coping with his family’s problems with the law at home.

It also shows him meeting with a therapist weekly to deal with a “unique form of trauma,” from his past. The film won Best Documentary Feature in 2022 at the South by Southwest Grand Jury Awards, as well as several other honors.

Morton, 41, sees both similarities and stark differences between his life and Tanner’s.

Tanner’s father was a prominent bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal church; his mother escaped enslavement on the Underground Railroad as a child and met her husband at college in Pittsburgh.

Yet, despite Tanner’s high social class status among Black Americans, Tanner first struggled as an artist. He lived between two worlds: He faced racial discrimination in the art academy in the United States, but found acceptance and international acclaim in Paris.

Morton was born in Kansas City, Mo., to a teen mother. While he was growing up, he saw both his mother and his grandmother using cocaine. His mother also sold drugs and was in and out of jail. Morton began selling when he became a teenager.

Yet, within this environment, he says in the film, certain teachers at his elementary school “would pull me aside and tell me I have something there … [that there was] this potential that was kind of recognized and encouraged.’”

At 20, Tanner, enrolled in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he was tutored by Thomas Eakins, who became his mentor.

At 19, Morton was sentenced to 11 years in federal prison.

“Two ounces of crack cocaine,” he says in the documentary. “For that small amount, probably the equivalent of a couple of walnuts, I was sentenced to 135 month, that’s 11 years, three months in federal prison.” He was released after 10 years.

In prison, Morton turned his school-age talent of drawing pictures of his classmates into a business of painting portraits of others incarcerated as well as prison officials.

He also painted murals inside prison walls. He said he used money from the portraits to buy paint supplies and studied art books while incarcerated.

But none of those art books mentioned Tanner.

In a coincidence that spans across more than a century, Tanner left PAFA in 1885 and attempted to start his career in Philadelphia, but gave up and moved to Atlanta at age 29. There, he started a photography business and taught drawing at Clark College.

Morton left prison in 2013 and also moved to Atlanta at age 29. He found a job at a gym where he painted a portrait of the gym owner. A board member of the Florence Academy of Art U.S. saw it hanging there.

Within a year of his release, Morton was enrolled in a three-year program to study at the Florence Academy in Jersey City, N.J., and graduated in 2017.

At the academy, Morton came under the same pressures that Tanner felt while studying at PAFA. He said that his instructors treated him unfairly and that one made racist comments to him.

An academy instructor, not one of Morton’s teachers, saw those circumstances and suggested to Morton that he research Tanner’s life and career. Morton was amazed when he discovered him.

“I didn’t learn about Tanner when I was going to school, or even in the text books I studied in prison,” Morton said.

And like Tanner, Morton is teaching art in Atlanta at his own school, Atelier South.

Now, he hopes the new mural will spread the word about Tanner’s contributions to classical art.

But Morton does not want people to say that he and Tanner were “trying to find a place in their [Europeans’] traditions.

“The earliest naturalistic, realistic images were in North Africa. They were the original alchemists, mixing natural elements to create colors. The Europeans got it from us! It was our creation, and we’re reclaiming it.”