Edward Mitchell Bannister (November 2, 1828January 9, 1901) was a Canadian–American oil painter of the American Barbizon School. Born in colonial New Brunswick, he spent his adult life in New England in the United States. There, along with his wife Christiana Carteaux, he was a prominent member of African-American cultural and political communities, such as the Boston abolition movement. Bannister received national recognition after he won a first prize in painting at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition. He was also a founding member of the Providence Art Club and the Rhode Island School of Design.
Bannister's style and predominantly pastoral subject matter reflected his admiration for the French artist Jean-François Millet and the French Barbizon School. A lifelong sailor, he also looked to the Rhode Island seaside for inspiration. Bannister continually experimented, and his artwork displays his Idealist philosophy and his control of color and atmosphere. He began his professional practice as a photographer and portraitist before developing his better-known landscape style.
Later in his life, Bannister's style of landscape painting fell out of favor. With decreasing painting sales, he and Christiana Carteaux moved out of College Hill in Providence to Boston and then a smaller house on Wilson Street in Providence. Bannister was overlooked in American art historical studies and exhibitions after his death in 1901, until institutions like the National Museum of African Art returned him to national attention in the 1960s and 1970s.
Biography Early life Bannister was born on November 2, 1828, in Saint Andrews, a settlement in the Colony of New Brunswick near the St. Croix River. His father, Edward Bannister, was born in Barbados.Holland and Jennings, Edward Mitchell Bannister, 1828–1901, 17; and Bearden and Henderson, A History of African-American Artists, 41. His mother, Hannah Bannister (), was also born in colonial New Brunswick, according to Bannister, "a stone's throw of my birthplace on the banks of the St. Croix River." Hannah's parents were probably from Barbados."United States Census, 1880", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M4SD-165 : Fri Oct 06 23:50:11 UTC 2023), Entry for E.M. Bannister and Christina Bannister, 1880."United States Census, 1900", FamilySearch (https://www.familysearch.org/ark:/61903/1:1:M97T-ZQ2 : Thu Oct 05 00:59:35 UTC 2023), Entry for Edward M Bannister and Christiana Bannister, 1900. Although both of his parents were black, Bannister was sometimes identified as "Mulatto". At the time, this designation was based on skin color as perceived by the Census taker, and did not reflect self-identity or family history.Hochschild, J. L., & Powell, B. M. (2008). Racial reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, half-breeds, mixed parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican race. Studies in American Political Development, 22(1), 59-96. Bannister's father died in 1832, so Edward and his younger brother William were raised by their mother. Early on, Bannister was apprenticed to a cobbler, but his drawing skill was already noted among his friends and family. Bannister credited his mother with igniting his early interest in art. She died in 1844, after which Bannister and his brother lived on the farm of the wealthy lawyer and merchant Harris Hatch. There, he practiced drawing by reproducing Hatch family portraits and copying British engravings in the family library.
Bannister and his brother found work aboard ships as mates and cooks for several months before immigrating to Boston, sometime in the late 1840s. In the 1850 US census, they are listed as living at the same boarding house, with the Revaleon family, and working as barbers. The brothers' role as barbers and status as mixed race gave them relatively high standing as middle-class professionals within Boston.
Although he aspired to work as a painter, Bannister had difficulty finding an apprenticeship or academic programs that would accept him, due to racial prejudice. Boston was an abolitionist stronghold, but it was also one of the most segregated cities in the US in 1860. Bannister would later express his frustration with being blocked from artistic education: "Whatever may be my success as an artist is due more to inherited potential than to instruction" and "All I would do I cannot... simply for the want of proper training."
Bannister received his first oil painting commission, The Ship Outward Bound, in 1854 from an African American doctor, John V. DeGrasse. Jacob R. Andrews, a gilder, painter, and member of the Histrionic Club, created the commission's gilt frame. DeGrasse later commissioned Bannister to paint portraits of him and his wife. Patronage like DeGrasse's was critical to Bannister's early career, as the African American community wanted to support and highlight its contributions to high culture. African Americans found portraiture an "ideal medium" for expressing their freedom and opportunity, which is probably why most of Bannister's earliest commissions are within that genre.
Through abolitionist newspapers like The Anglo-African and The Liberator and the writings of Martin R. Delany, Bannister likely learned about other African American artists like Robert S. Duncanson, James Presley Ball, Patrick H. Reason, and David Bustill Bowser. Their work would have made Bannister's ambition seem all the more possible. Although most cultural institutions barred Black Bostonians from entrance, Bannister would have had access to several, like the Boston Athenæum library, with collections of European art sources and exhibitions of Luminist marine painters like Robert Salmon and Fitz Hugh Lane.
Boston activist, artist, and student
Bannister met Christiana Carteaux, a hairdresser and businesswoman born in Rhode Island to African American and Narragansett parents, in 1853 when he applied to be a barber in her salon. Both were members of Boston's diverse abolitionist movement, and barbershops were important meeting places for African American abolitionists. They married on June 10, 1857, and she became, in effect, his most important patron. The couple boarded for two years with Lewis Hayden and Harriet Bell Hayden at 66 Southac Street, a stop on Boston's Underground Railroad (a support network for escaped slaves).
In 1855 William Cooper Nell acknowledged Bannister's rising artistic status in The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution for his The Ship Outward Bound. Bannister also received encouragement to continue painting from artist Francis Bicknell Carpenter. By 1858, Bannister was listed as an artist in Boston's city directory. Around 1862, he spent a year training in photography in New York, likely to support his painting practice. He then found work as a photographer, taking solar plates and tinting photos. One of Bannister's earliest commissioned portraits was of Prudence Nelson Bell in 1864, which is around when he found studio space at the Studio Building in Boston. At the Studio Building, he came into contact with other prominent artists, like Elihu Vedder and John La Farge. Once Bannister was established as an artist, abolitionist William Wells Brown praised him in a 1865 book:
Bannister was part of Boston's African American artistic community, which included Edmonia Lewis, William H. Simpson, and Nelson A. Primus. He sang as a tenor in the Crispus Attucks Choir, which performed anti-slavery songs at public events, and acted with the Histrionic Club, as well as serving as a delegate for the New England Colored Citizens Conventions in August 1859 and 1865. His name also appears on several public petitions published in The Liberator.
Bannister and Carteaux were devout members of the militant abolitionist Twelfth Baptist Church, located on Southac Street near their home at the Hayden House. In May 1859, Bannister served as the secretary for the church's meetings to respond to the Oberlin–Wellington Rescue of imprisoned fugitive slaves and, in 1863, to plan celebrations for the Emancipation Proclamation.
During the US Civil War, Carteaux lobbied for equal pay for African American soldiers and organized the 1864 soldiers' relief fair for the Massachusetts 54th infantry regiment, 55th infantry regiment, and 5th cavalry regiment, which had gone without pay for over a year and a half. Bannister donated his full-length portrait of Robert Gould Shaw, the commander of the 54th killed in action, to raise money for the cause. Bannister's portrait of Gould Shaw was displayed with the label "Our Martyr", according to abolitionist Lydia Maria Child. The portrait was praised in the New York Weekly Anglo-African as "a fine specimen of art" and inspired a poem by Martha Perry Lowe entitled The Picture of Col. Shaw in Boston. The painting was purchased by the state of Massachusetts and installed in its state house, but its current location is unknown.
The Bannister portrait of Robert Gould Shaw was one of several memorials to Gould Shaw by members of Boston's African American artistic community such as Edmonia Lewis. These artworks, put to the practical purpose of raising money for Black soldiers, contradicted the ideals of Boston Brahmin abolitionists, such as the Gould Shaws. Although the Brahmins supported abolition, they saw it as an abstract good rather than a concrete cause in need of material support. The portrait's paternalistic praise from Lowe and Child exemplified the divide between Boston's white abolitionists and the African American community. Through art like the 1884 Robert Gould Shaw Memorial, the Boston Brahmins rejected the possessive "Our Martyr" label given to him by Black artists like Bannister and Edmonia Lewis.
Bannister's activism also took other forms: on June 17, 1865, Bannister marshaled around two hundred members of the Twelfth Baptist Sunday School at a Grand Temperance Celebration on Boston Common. They marched under a banner reading "Equal rights for all men".
Bannister eventually studied at the Lowell Institute with the artist William Rimmer, while Rimmer taught evening life drawing classes at the Institute between 1863 and 1865. Rimmer was known for his skill in artistic anatomy, an area Bannister knew was one of his weaknesses. Because of Bannister's daytime photography business, he mostly took his drawing classes at night. Through Rimmer and the community at the Studio Building, Bannister was inspired by the Barbizon School-influenced paintings of William Morris Hunt, who had studied in Europe and held public exhibitions in Boston around the 1860s. At the Lowell Institute, Bannister formed a lifelong friendship with painter John Nelson Arnold; both later became founding members of the Providence Art Club. Bannister also formed a temporary painting partnership with Asa R. Lewis that lasted from 1868 to 1869. During that partnership of "Bannister & Lewis", Bannister began to advertise himself as both a portrait and landscape painter.
Despite his early commissions, Bannister still struggled to receive wider recognition for his work due to racism in the US. Following emancipation and the end of the US Civil War, the abolitionists began to disperse and, with them, their patronage. Due to increasing competition, Bannister did little to support Primus, who had come to him seeking an apprenticeship. An article in the New York Herald belittled both Bannister and his work: "The negro has an appreciation for art while being manifestly unable to produce it." The article reportedly spurred his desire to achieve success as an artist. At the same time, Bannister had begun to receive more recognition within Boston art circles.
Providence