This son of a former slave and a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church became a role model for a generation of black American artists who began to assert themselves after World War I, especially during the Harlem Renaissance.
What he achieved was remarkable, but then he was an exceptional person who came from an exceptional family. Although a cultural hero to African Americans, years passed after he died in 1937 at age 78 before American museums began to give his work extensive exposure.
In Philadelphia, where Tanner was reared and went to art school, this last happened exactly 21 years ago, when the Philadelphia Museum of Art mounted an exhibition of 85 paintings and 20 works on paper.
The show didn't so much discover Tanner as revive him for a new audience.
The previous Tanner show here had been in 1945, at the Philadelphia Art Alliance.
Now the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where the artist studied in the early 1880s, has organized what it describes as the most comprehensive examination of his career to date - more than 100 works, including 12 paintings that have never been seen in any retrospective.
The exhibition catalog, published by University of California Press, contains 14 essays by American and French scholars examining various aspects of Tanner's life and career. PAFA and Bunker Hill Press also have published a children's book about him written and illustrated by artist Faith Ringgold.
The most celebrated of the exhibition loans is The Resurrection of Lazarus from the Musee d'Orsay, which won a medal at the 1897 Salon and was purchased by the French government. It has never been exhibited in America.
