Henry Ossawa Tanner House
This was the home of the remarkable Tanner family for three quarters of a century. Although it was nominated as a National Historic Landmark because of its association with the early life of the painter Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), the house belonged to Henry’s father Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835-1923), a prominent theologian, social activist, editor, and a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal church. He and his wife Sarah Miller Tanner purchased the house in 1872, just a year after it was constructed by builder Daniel H. Bry. Their painter son was only one of the seven accomplished children the Tanners raised in this house, where Bishop Tanner lived until his death.
The Tanners added a two-story bay window to the front of the house in 1908 and made several additions at
the rear. The bay and the original bracketed Italianate cornice were later covered with aluminum siding.
The Tanner children who lived in the house included Henry, the painter, and Halle Tanner Dillon Johnson (1864-1901), the first woman licensed to practice medicine in Alabama. Their granddaughter Sadie Tanner Mossell Alexander (1898–1989) also made her home here while studying at the University of Pennsylvania. She was the first Black woman to earn a PhD (in economics) from an American university and the first to earn a law degree from Penn. Alexander became a prominent civil rights attorney and inherited the house, which she owned until 1950.
The Tanners arrived in Philadelphia in 1868, when Benjamin Tanner brought his growing family from Washington. They are first recorded as living at 631 Pine Street, above the offices of the Christian Recorder, the widely read newspaper of the AME church that Tanner edited from 1868 until 1884. The newspaper offices were in the Seventh Ward, the center of Black life in Philadelphia.
In the summer of 1872, the twelve-year-old Henry Ossawa Tanner moved with his parents and siblings into their new house on Diamond Street. It would be the center of his life for the next two decades.
Fairmount Park was just four blocks away, and it was there, when Tanner was twelve or thirteen, that he had the experience that changed his life. As he later recalled, “I was walking out with my father one fine afternoon … when I saw for the first time a real, live artist -- and at work. … It was this simple event that, as it were, set me on fire. … [A]fter seeing this artist at work for on hour, it was decided on the spot, by me at least, that I would become one, and I assure you it was no ordinary one I had in mind.” [H.0. Tanner, "The Story of an Artist's Life, " World's Work vol. 18, no. 2 (June 1909), p. 11662]
Tanner took up his new vocation immediately, assembling paints and brushes and stealing a piece of the awning over the kitchen door for a canvas. His studies began with occasional private lessons and continued in 1879-1885 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the tutelage of Thomas Eakins. His parents continued to support him and this house remained his home, and for a time he even kept the unruly sheep that he was using as a model in the backyard.
He recalled, “My father and mother gave me all the encouragement their then limited means would allow. By encouragement I mean not only moral support but a home…. Each time on leaving home, they always said: ‘Remember, if the worst comes to the worse, you always have a home.’" [p. 11664]
After struggling to sell his paintings in Philadelphia, Tanner moved to Atlanta in 1889 to try his hand at running a photographic studio. This was barely profitable and gave him no time to paint, so he closed the business and taught drawing for two terms at Clark University. In getting this job he was supported by Joseph Crane Hartzell, the Missionary Bishop for Africa of the (white) Methodist Episcopal Church, and his wife Jennie. The Hartzells also arranged for an exhibition of his paintings in Cincinnati, and, when none sold, purchased them all. This gave him the money that enabled him to move in 1891 to Paris where he enrolled in the Académie Julian.
Tanner never returned permanently to America, but he visited his family in 1893-1894 and 1896. On the first trip, undertaken to complete his recovery from typhus, he traveled to Chicago for the World’s Columbian Exhibition, where he exhibited a painting and delivered a paper entitled “The American Negro in Art” at the
He completed several paintings, including the famous “Banjo Lesson,” while again living in this house. Its display in the window of a Philadelphia art gallery was reported in the Philadelphia Inquirer on November 12, 1893. In the next year it would be the first of his first works to be accepted by the Paris Salon—and so his boyhood home was also the launchpad of his international career.
Organizational website: https://savethetannerhouse.org/
Primary Contact: [email protected]
Address: 2908 W. Diamond Street
Learn more about the preservation efforts of Tanner's house in Philadelphia