Edward Mitchell Bannister

Early Life

Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, in 1828. His father was a Black native of Barbados. The racial identity of his mother is unknown, although at least one source suggests she was a free Black. His father died when Bannister was three or four years old. His mother, Hannah Alexander Bannister, died in 1844. Bannister lived as a foster child with the family of white judge and merchant Harris Hatch. Bannister’s mother or grandmother may have been cook and housekeeper for the Hatches. Bannister worked at sea before moving to Boston in 1848. In Boston, he held a few menial jobs before becoming a barber and learning to paint.

Early Artistic Career

Bannister was drawing by the time he was 10 years old and later credited his mother with nurturing his early artistic efforts. He enrolled in the Lowell Institute in Boston and attended the evening drawing class of noted sculptor and anatomist Dr. William Rimmer. Shortly afterward, Bannister obtained space in the Boston Studio Building to practice his art.    

Few of Bannister’s early Boston paintings survive, so art historians cannot fully assess his style at that time. They assume he would have seen and been influenced by the paintings of William Morris Hunt, who had studied in Europe and held several exhibitions in Boston in the 1860s. Hunt painted in the French Barbizon School style of simple rustic and pastoral scenes.  

Marriage and Activism

On 10 June 1857, Bannister married Christiana Babcock, a wigmaker and hairdresser whom he had met in a theatrical troupe. Christiana, 10 years his senior, was a Narragansett Indigenous American who may also have had Black ancestry. Bannister got a job as a barber at a salon owned by Christiana, one of a chain of hairdressing salons under the name of Madame Carteaux. The couple did not have children. 

In the 1850s and 1860s, the Bannisters were involved in Boston’s abolitionist movement. At the time, slavery was still legal in many states, and society was racially segregated. Bannister’s colleagues included several leading Black abolitionists, and he was an officer in two abolitionist organizations. He added his name to antislavery petitions and was a delegate at two New England Coloured Citizens Conventions. In about 1870, the couple moved to Providence, Rhode Island.  

Later Artistic Career

In 1867, Bannister read an article in the New York Herald that drove him to excel as an artist. “The Negro seems to have an appreciation for art,” the article noted, “while being manifestly unable to produce it.” In 1876, one of Bannister’s paintings was accepted into the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, America’s first world fair. “Under the Oaks” (now lost) received the first-prize medal, but when the judges discovered that Bannister was Black, they wanted to reverse their decision. They relented, however, when white competitors supported giving the award to Bannister. After this success, Bannister’s reputation grew. He received several commissions, which allowed him to devote himself to painting full-time.

Most of Bannister’s paintings are landscapes of quiet country scenes, which include central images such as cottages, castles, cattle, dawns, sunsets and ponds or small lakes. He used sombre colours and depicted nature as a calm and submissive power rather than a dominant one. Bannister also painted portraits, figure studies, religious scenes, seascapes and still lifes.

Although Bannister sometimes painted in watercolours, he primarily used oils in a painting technique known as “impasto” (Italian for “mixture”). In impasto, paint is laid thickly on a surface so that brush and palette knife marks remain visible in the finished painting.

Although Hunt’s influence is evident in his early paintings, Bannister gradually developed his own style. He moved from heavy impasto with few details to a softer impasto using the impressionist techniques that had started in Paris in the 1860s. Impressionism emphasizes the effects of light on a scene, which its proponents attempted to emulate by painting quickly outdoors instead of in a studio. Artists used rapid brushstrokes broken down into separate dabs to try to capture the fleeting quality of the light.   

Did you know?
Impressionism was developed by Claude Monet and other artists based in Paris, where they first exhibited their work in 1874. Art critics expressed scorn for this new style, singling out Monet’s “Impression, Sunrise” for their disdain. What the critics intended as ridicule inspired the name for the new movement.  

During the 1870s and 1880s, Bannister became one of Providence’s leading artists. Due to poor health, his output was reduced by the 1890s, and he suffered from dementia in later life. He died of a heart attack in 1901 while attending an evening prayer meeting at the Elmwood Avenue Baptist Church.

Recognition

Shortly after his death, Bannister’s friends mounted a memorial exhibition of 101 paintings at the Providence Art Club. The show noted he was “par excellence a landscape painter, and the best one our state has produced.” 

The same friends erected a three-metre-tall granite boulder over his grave in Providence’s North Burial Ground. It bears two bronze plaques. One is a representation of an artist’s palette with Bannister’s name and a pipe. The other, which is surrounded by laurel leaves, bears an inscription that reads in part: “this pure and lofty soul … who, while he portrayed nature, walked with God.”

In September 2023, the Providence Art Club unveiled a life-sized sculpture of Bannister. He is sitting on a public bench looking out at the Providence River while making a drawing in his sketchbook.

Legacy

In 1880, Bannister cofounded the Providence Art Club, which still exists. Members of the club later created what became today’s Rhode Island School of Design.

Today, Bannister’s paintings are on display in several art galleries and museums. The Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C., has the most extensive collection of his work.