Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828 - 1901) was active/lived in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, New Brunswick / Canada. Edward Bannister is known for Idealized landscape, marine, portrait and still life painting.


Medium: Oil on canvas
Size: 20" x 30"
Frame Size: 27 1/2" x "37 1/2
Condition: Great, some restoration patch on verso. Restoration on the bottom part
Signature: lower right

Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) was the first African-American to win major national recognition as an artist. He was born in Canada and served on some Canadian vessels in an unknown capacity before moving to Boston where he worked as a barber while trying to establish a career as a portrait painter. He married Christiana Carteaux, a successful businesswoman who owned several hairdressing salons; the two were active in Boston Abolitionist activities.

In 1869 the couple moved to Providence, and in 1876 Bannister was awarded a bronze (first-prize) medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. He submitted his painting Under the Oaks with no identification other than his signature and later recalled that when he appeared before the awards committee to claim his prize, "an explosion could not have created more of a sensation in that room." Bannister was deeply committed to fostering the development of art in Providence, and along with colleagues George Whitaker and Charles Stetson was a founder of the Providence Art Club. He was an avid sailor and made frequent sketching expeditions along the Southern New England coast aboard his yacht 'Fanchon.'

Well-educated and highly spiritual, Bannister was greatly influenced by the French Barbizon school, whose serene view of nature and sympathetic portrayal of laborers coincided with his own belief in "the harmony in all created things." He also admired the work of American painter Washington Allston, and shared similar interests in Biblical and mythological themes.

Bannister was largely self-taught as an artist, though he studied briefly with William Rimmer of Boston. Few of his portraits and still lifes survive, and he is best known for his moody, contemplative landscapes and coastal scenes of Rhode Island and southeastern Massachusetts. Bannister was always conscious of his limited formal training and set rigorous technical goals for himself, reportedly destroying his works when they did not please him. As his career progressed, the prominence of both animals and figures in his paintings receded, and his most successful paintings exhibit a masterful handling of atmospheric effects, land, and water. By the end of his career, he had achieved a lush, unencumbered style that captured an acute sense of time, place, and mood. He was generally acknowledged as a painter of "poetic sensibility," a description that is still apt today.


PROVENANCE
Long Island ,New York private collection

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