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Career, Romance, md Fdmily Soon after we got settled a foreign-looking young man was placed opposite us at the table, but we noticed his French had a very decided American twang, delivered with some spluttering and stumbling. We soon learned his name was H. 0. Tanner, the now, very famous Negro artist? We became very friendly with him and never knew his race `till a long time afterwards. He made France his home while we returned to America at the end of our first married year. Tanner and I each sent a picture to the Salon. His was re- jected and mine received with a stamp of No. 3. All stamped pictures competing for honors.`" 2s "When Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859~1937), the son of a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, was elected to the French National Acad- emy, he proved to the world that a Black could achieve international acceptance as a serious artist . . . . After a brief teaching career at Clark College in Atlanta, and an unsuccessful exhibit of his paintings in Cincinnati, Tanner fled to France in 1891 . . . . [He] studied for five years at the Julian Academy -an institu- tion . . . famed for such illustrious graduates as Henri Matisse . . . . Summers were spent in Brittany, recording on canvas the leisure activities of the peasants." Elsa Honig Fine, The Afro-Americnn Artist - A Send for Identity (New York City: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, Inc., 1973), 67-75. It was also during the period 189 l-9 3 that Harwood "studied at the Acad- emy Julian, under Jean Paul Laurens, Benjamin Constant," and others. Students working under Constant, Laurens, Bonnat, and Lefebvre from 1888 to 1893 in- cluded traditionalists such as Harwood and Tanner, and also such modernists as Matisse, Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec, Edvard Munch, Raoul Dufy, and Othon Friesz. Harwood, "National Cyclopedia," 2. 20 Harwood wanted the most important recognition a traditional student of his day could receive - acceptance into the famed official French Salon. Work- ing to this end, he created the carefully painted Dutch-like genre piece entitled P1-epnmtion for Dinner. His daughter wrote: "His large picture, `Preparation for Dinner,' which now hangs in the [University of Utah] Union building, was . . . . submitted for the following Salon [ 18923, which is the important art event of the year in Paris. The picture was admitted and well hung, and that opening day, May lst, was a memorable one for them and a time of great rejoic- ing." Hmwood Art Exhibitios, 4-5. Harwood apparently took another study of the figure used for his Child of B&tnq and combined it with a study of Hattie (a scene showing her painting in their studio in 1891 called Art Student), and various still-life forms and put them together in Prepnmtioz for Dimer. Dibble, "Harwood Story," Tlibufze, 11 November 1979; and Janet M. Brussard, et al., The Collection of Utnh Artists (Salt Lake City: A. Ray Olpin University Union, University of Utah, 1982), 4-5. 39 |
