Artist Henry Ossawa Tanner’s career and works exhibited at Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts

This article originally published in The Inquirer on Jan. 22, 2012.

Henry Ossawa Tanner isn’t a giant of American art on the order of Thomas Eakins or Winslow Homer, yet he’s a significant figure in this country’s art history.

That might sound contradictory until one considers that more than a century ago Tanner proved to white America that a black painter could measure up to the highest standards of his profession — even if he had to move to France to do so.

Tanner was honored in racially tolerant France as he was not, and never could have been, in his native country. Besides winning prizes at the prestigious Paris Salons, he was inducted into the Legion of Honor. The French government also bought two of his paintings for the state collection.

This son of a former slave and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church became a role model for a generation of black American artists who began to assert themselves after World War I, especially during the Harlem Renaissance.

What he achieved was remarkable, but then he was an exceptional person who came from an exceptional family. Although a cultural hero to African Americans, years passed after he died in 1937 at age 78 before American museums began to give his work extensive exposure.

In Philadelphia, where Tanner was reared and went to art school, this last happened exactly 21 years ago, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of 85 paintings and 20 works on paper.

The show didn’t so much discover Tanner as revive him for a new audience.

The previous Tanner show here had been in 1945, at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.

Now the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the artist studied in the early 1880s, has organized what it describes as the most comprehensive examination of his career to date — more than 100 works, including 12 paintings that have never been seen in any retrospective.

The exhibition catalog, published by University of California Press, contains 14 essays by American and French scholars examining various aspects of Tanner's life and career. PAFA and Bunker Hill Press also have published a children's book about him written and illustrated by artist Faith Ringgold.

The most celebrated of the exhibition loans is The Resurrection of Lazarus from the Musee d'Orsay, which won a medal at the 1897 Salon and was purchased by the French government. It has never been exhibited in America.

Like The Annunciation, lent by the Art Museum, and Mary, from La Salle Univerity, it's typical of the paintings that earned Tanner a reputation as an imaginative interpreter of religious themes.

» READ MORE: Henry Tanner is a key part of Philly’s history. Don’t let his home be destroyed | Opinion

Given his father’s position in the AME church — Benjamin Tanner was elected a bishop in 1888 — it seems logical that the younger Tanner would gravitate to biblical subjects.

He didn't start out that way, however, first aspiring to specialize in seascapes, then switching to painting animals, which gave way in turn to scenes of African American life. He even tried, briefly, to make a career in photography.

As it developed after he moved to Paris permanently in the mid-1890s, religious subjects proved to be more popular with the art establishment and private patrons. The Bible consequently made his reputation and his career.

Although Tanner was born in Pittsburgh, his associations with Philadelphia are strong.

His family moved here in 1868, when he was about 9. He studied at the Pennsylvania Academy with Eakins and Thomas Hovenden.

Eakins' memorable portrait of Tanner, painted about 1897 and now in the Hyde Collection in Glens Falls, N.Y., is one of several works by this influential mentor included in the retrospective.

Rodman Wanamaker, son of department-store owner John, was another important local connection for Tanner. He subsidized two extended trips by the artist to Egypt and Palestine in the mid-1890s to experience firsthand the landscapes, architecture, and cultural ambience that would give his biblical paintings authenticity.

Tanner settled in France because he found there a degree of racial tolerance absent in America. In 1899 he married a white American singer, Jessie Macauley Olssen, whom he had met in Paris; they had a son, Jesse, who established a French branch of the family.

As with Eakins, Tanner's reputation faded for a few decades after his death, a few months short of his 78th birthday. It was revived in 1969 by a retrospective at the National Collection of Fine Arts, now the Smithsonian American Art Museum, that traveled to five other museums.

Over the last two decades, subsequent traveling exhibitions have set the stage for the academy show, which will travel to Cincinnati and Houston.

It presents Tanner not only as a black American cultural hero and leader of American expatriates in France but as a religious painter with a "modern spirit."

We look to the paintings on the academy's walls to demonstrate just how "modern" that spirit in fact was.

“Henry Ossawa Tanner: Modern Spirit” will be exhibited at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 118-128 N. Broad St., from Jan. 28 to April 15. Hours are 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. Tuesdays through Saturdays and 11 to 5 Sundays. Admission to special exhibitions is $15 general, $12 for visitors 60 and older, students with ID and visitors 13 to 18. Information: 215-972-7600 or www.pafa.org.