The Banjo Lesson Analysis

Late 19th century American art was influenced by a number of art movements such as, impressionism, realism, and symbolism. Some artists were inspired to create genre paintings to enforce their significance in subjects from everyday life including figures, landscapes, and objects. These scenes of everyday life in America did not, however, include people of color. Thus, this segment of the population was being portrayed in an infelicitous angle due to the prejudices of the period, with biased media depicting people of color, especially African-Americans, in negative stereotypical images that were created as an entertainment for white audiences. The Banjo Lesson, painted by a Black artist, Henry Ossawa Tanner, was the first genre painting to reconstruct …show more content…
Soft brushstrokes with oil paint are applied on the canvas and he uses a delicate chiaroscuro on the figures’ bodies and other objects in order to create depth, mass, and volume. Warm hues such as yellow, orange, and brown are placed in the cool area to enforce the light that shines from the fireplace in the right. Also, blue light from the left are casted on the old man’s left side of his face and hand which give off his partial facial features. Tanner uses two light sources to “depict the effect of warm and cool illumination on the figures’ dark skin” (Mosby, 119). His choice of color helps create nice tone in the room like it is a home for the viewer. The background walls with hanging pictures and objects on the far table adds to this sense of …show more content…
This was shown on such as pictorial sheet music covers, paintings, and minstrel shows in which allowed white actors to dress in blackface to play as the marginalized group as “happy-go-lucky, banjo-strumming simpletons for northern audiences” (Morgan, 171). However, Tanner paints The Banjo Lesson to alter the representation of African-Americans from negative to positive to introduce Black people in a respectable perspective other than the stereotypes that was placed on them. Tanner dislikes racism because he experienced harmful bigotry in the classroom filled with white classmates that judged his skin color instead of his artist merits. The Banjo Lesson is a reversal depiction of Uncle Tom even though it includes familiar features of this stereotypical character such as shabby outfits, bald, dark skin, hunched, broad-shoulder, and grandfatherly appearance. However, the difference of how Uncle Tom’s Cabin was illustrated in the 19th century was that Tanner inserted a Black boy instead of Eva, a young white aristocratic girl (Morgan, 190). The adjustment in the popular twosome from Uncle Tom’s Cabin shows that “Tanner was aware of Uncle Tom’s iconic presence, so ubiquitous was his personage by the 1890s” (Morgan, 189). It seems that he wants to shift viewer’s focus away from the Eurocentric perspective and move it toward the reality of Black lives.