Restoring Edward Mitchell Bannister’s Rightful Place in Art History

Edward Mitchell Bannister’s Untitled (Walking Through a Field) is on view at The Huntington, which acquired the painting in 2023 through the generosity of its Art Collectors’ Council. Bannister is considered one of the three most prominent Black American landscape painters of the 19th century, along with Grafton Tyler Brown and Robert Scott Duncanson, whose Landscape with Ruin was acquired by The Huntington in 2014. Untitled comes from the period that scholars consider the height of Bannister’s artistic career.

Lauren Cross, the Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Huntington, writes here about Bannister’s life and work—what motivated him, whom he credited for his success, and how he shifted from being a portraitist to a landscape artist.

In 1867, Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901) read a disparaging New York Herald article in which the writer, commenting on the large number of Black attendees at an art exhibition, claimed that “the Negro seems to have an appreciation for art while being manifestly unable to produce it.” This statement deeply offended Bannister and would drive his artistic endeavors for the rest of his career. He understood, as did many Black artists of his time, that there were few opportunities in the United States for Black people to receive art training and advance themselves in the field. Despite these challenges, Bannister would go on to prove the writer wrong, becoming one of the most significant Black painters of the 19th century.

Born free in St. Andrews, Canada, to a Barbadian father and a mother of Scottish ancestry, Bannister was raised with an optimistic vision of the arts—fueled by his mother’s encouragement and willingness to let him create. His father died in 1832, when Bannister was a small boy, and after his mother died in 1844, he and his younger brother, William, went to live and work on a local farm owned by a wealthy lawyer.

In the late 1840s, Bannister moved to Boston, Massachusetts, a free state, where a powerful circle of white and Black abolitionists helped to bring former slaves to freedom through the Underground Railroad. This cultural climate was ideal for Bannister, allowing him to live as a free man and participate in antislavery activism. However, he was still excluded from accessing the creative opportunities he most desired, such as attending art school or becoming an apprentice to a major artist.

In 1853, Bannister worked as a barber in a salon owned by Christiana Carteaux, a formerly enslaved woman who had become a hairdresser, businesswoman, and abolitionist. Bannister and Carteaux married in 1857. Her financial success as an entrepreneur with a chain of hair salons provided Bannister with time and space to work on his art full time and hone his craft. He would later credit her for providing the freedom to realize his full artistic potential.

Much of Bannister’s early career as an artist was supported by clients who frequented his wife’s salons, white and Black members of the Boston abolitionist community. Through their patronage, Bannister established himself as a major portrait painter in Boston, depicting on canvas many of the leading figures of the movement.

Except for some evening classes he took at the Lowell Institute in Boston, Bannister had no formal arts education, but he considered portrait painting as an opportunity to exercise his skills. In the 1860s, he went to New York to train as a photographer in order to earn a steadier stream of income, after which he began to photograph—and continued to paint—early abolitionists. Some of these rare photographic portraits are held in the Boston Athenaeum’s archives to this day. The Athenaeum would likely have been the central resource for Bannister’s study of original art during his Boston years, a reflection of the antislavery community’s involvement there.

While his major source of income came from portraiture, Bannister had a deep interest in the American landscape. A scrapbook of Bannister’s early sketches and drawings shows that as early as 1866 he had begun exploring landscape painting. He attended the Boston Athenaeum’s exhibitions of works in the style of French Barbizon painters during the late 1850s and found a connection with them. Deeply spiritual about his own artistic practice, he favored artists such as Jean-François Millet, whose earth-toned palette, loose brushwork, and soft forms were greatly admired by Bannister. He considered Millet to be the most “spiritual artist of our time.”

In 1870, the Bannisters moved to Providence, Rhode Island, Christiana Carteaux Bannister’s hometown. She owned a salon in the city, making it possible for the couple to settle there. Historians suggest that the Bannisters most likely left Boston because the racial climate there had shifted dramatically after emancipation. As increasing numbers of freed African Americans moved to Boston, racial tensions emerged between working-class white people and the newcomers. At the same time, members of Boston’s white abolitionist community shifted their focus to other causes. These changes may have reshaped the clientele at her Boston salons, making Providence more attractive to the couple.

Bannister’s portrait Newspaper Boy (1869) marked the end of his work as a portrait artist. For the next 30 years, he would train his brush on landscape painting. In Rhode Island, his confidence as an artist grew as he produced what would become not only the greatest proportion of his work but also his finest.

In 1876, Bannister became the first African American artist to win a national award when his painting Under the Oaks claimed a first prize at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. But racism was never far from the surface. His fellow artists had to rally to his defense when he was denied entry into the exposition to accept the award because of his race.

Nevertheless, winning this award significantly boosted Bannister’s profile in Providence, increasing exhibition opportunities and interest from collectors as well as securing his position as a leader in the local arts community. During this period, he became a founding member of the influential Providence Art Club and a founding board member of the Rhode Island School of Design.

Painted in the 1870s, Bannister’s landscape Untitled (Walking Through a Field), on view at The Huntington, features a solitary figure passing through a wheat field toward a distant lake. In the work, a pastel-infused sky radiates a soft light on the horizon, and majestic trees cast a long, irregular shadow across the field. The work is quiet and contemplative, a testimony to Bannister’s abiding tendency to create sumptuous, melancholic depictions of the natural world.

At around the same time, a reporter for the Daily Evening Traveler compared Bannister’s artistic talent with Frederick Douglass’ oratorical talent and claimed that Bannister was an “example of the power of this race to achieve great results in art.” By the end of his career, Bannister had experienced great success, and he was finally able to fully support his family through his art. His wife, Christiana, established a home in Providence for elderly Black women who could not gain access to other nursing homes because of their race. She would go on to live in the very nursing home she had started before her death in 1903.

Bannister died of a heart attack in 1901. Toward the end of his life and thereafter, Bannister’s art faded from public view, arguably because of shifting trends in collecting as well as racial prejudice. Nevertheless, the legacy of Edward and Christiana Bannister lives on in Providence, where historians have acknowledged the couple’s creative and social contributions to the city. As for his acclaim more widely, Bannister began to attract increased attention following the Civil Rights Movement. Over time, as scholars at museums across the country have considered his artistic production more thoroughly, his work has begun to claim its rightful place in the art historical canon.

Lauren Cross is the Gail-Oxford Associate Curator of American Decorative Arts at The Huntington.