“Ultimately, any study of the art and the artist must encompass the man. . . Bannister believed that art was a moral power, and his identity as an African American merged with his delight in knowledge and his love of art as a power for good.”
Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in New Brunswick, Canada, circa 1828. After working on trading ships in the Northeast, he moved to Boston with his brother by 1850. Census records confirm they were employed as hairdressers and Bannister simultaneously pursued ambitions to become an artist. It was in 1854 that he was awarded his first commission by Dr. John V. DeGrasse, a leading member of the Boston’s Black community. The collective of flourishing African American artists he joined there played a significant role in nurturing Bannister’s development as a working artist. During his formative years in Boston he was denied access by the established, predominantly White, arts community to basic training, educational apprenticeships and European travel. For Bannister and many African American communities living in the Northeast during the period following the Civil War, freedom was realized only in part–they still lived in a society segregated by Jim Crow laws and witnessed the horrific reality of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850. Juanita Marie Holland writes, and as evidenced by Bannister’s accomplishments during this period, “The pursuit of excellence became a means by which to hold back the deluge of racial stereotypes in literature and art” (Juanita Marie Holland, Edward Mitchell Bannister 1828-1901, New York, 1992, p. 21).
The start of the following decade marked advancements for Bannister and his entrance into the White arts community in Boston. In 1863 he began formal training under Dr. William Rimmer, a local physician and sculptor, who admitted Bannister as the only African American student to his evening drawing classes. Then in October of 1969 Bannister and his wife moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he again found a thriving community of African American artists whose leaders welcomed him as an already established talent. By 1872 he took a studio at the Woods Building and worked there for the remainder of his career. He began to exhibit his work more frequently in Providence and continued to submit works to be considered for exhibition at the Boston Arts Club. The awards and accolades bestowed upon Bannister’s work during this prolific period were assigned based upon the aesthetic achievements illustrated in his paintings. Bannister’s race, however, was prejudicial. He was acutely aware of this dynamic and intentionally submitted the painting Under The Oaks (unlocated) to the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition of 1876 with just a signature and no further identifying information about the artist. Bannister explained this decision saying, “I was not an artist to them, simply an inquisitive colored man” (ibid, p. 34). He later discovered in the newspaper that his painting, only recorded as number fifty-four on the exhibition checklist, had won first prize. Bannister told the Chicago Times in 1895, “I was and am proud to know that the jury of award did not know anything about me, my antecedents, color or race. There was no sentimental sympathy leading to the award of the medal” (ibid, p . 25).
The limited number of works that have been located and accurately attributed to Bannister, many of them landscape subjects, reflect a broad range of stylistic influences. As Holland explains, “Experimentation was clearly part of a lifelong process of artistic education for Bannister, and he seems to have easily quoted different styles as they suited his vision for a particular work” (ibid, p. 34). In discussing The Palmer River she notes Bannisters “affinity for free and lushly rendered surfaces” (bid). She concludes, “Although Bannister has until now been viewed primarily as a Barbizon-influenced painter of pastoral landscapes . . . the range of his artistic production indicates more varied thematic and stylistic concerns . . . A strong sense of compositional design endowed his paintings with a charged stillness of tremendous energy, and his best works combine a tactile exploration of painting with a reverent and poetic sensibility. He was a painter whose powerful spiritual convictions infused his views of nature with a pantheistic celebration of what he defined as the ‘infinite, subtle qualities of the spiritual idea, centering in all created things. . . .’” (ibid, pp. 53, 57)
“Bannister often struggled to translate his vision of nature into paint – he was extremely self-critical, discarding works when they fell short of his high standards, once even famously using a painting to shovel ash. When his creativity, aesthetic philosophy and artistic skill conflated to his own satisfaction, however, as here in Palmer River, his painting soars, offering one of the most complex and beautiful envisionings of the American pastoral in the late 19th century.”
As demand for his work grew, Bannister’s position among the Providence art society was cemented. In 1878, while serving on the board of the Rhode Island School of Design, he joined George Whitaker and Charles Walter Stetson in founding what would later become the Providence Art Club. The charter became a fundamental organization dedicated to the preservation and promotion of their burgeoning arts community. Through the 1880s though, many of the established artistic institutions in America were still marred with conflicting business and political interests which did not always afford Bannister and other African Americans the equity they so deserved among their artistic peers. After the largest exhibition of Bannister’s works during his lifetime had been mounted at the Providence Art Club in 1891, his friend George Whitaker offered the following reflection, “Is it right that a man of such power should be allowed to slip through our community without due recognition?” (ibid, p. 53).
Whitaker’s commitment to ensuring Bannister’s legacy began with a retrospective exhibition featuring more than 100 of the artist’s works, lent by prominent private collectors and patrons, at the Providence Art Club the year he died in 1901. Decades later Bannister was posthumously inducted into the Rhode Island Heritage Hall of Fame and Rhode Island College established the Bannister Gallery in his honor in 1978. In 2017, more than a century after his death, the Providence City Council voted to rename Magee Street, formerly named after a prominent Rhode Island slave trader, to Bannister Street in memory of the significant contributions Bannister and his wife Christiana made toward bettering their community for its disenfranchised Black members. Holland concludes, “Ultimately, any study of the art and the artist must encompass the man. . . Bannister believed that art was a moral power, and his identity as an African American merged with his delight in knowledge and his love of art as a power for good” (ibid, p. 57)