Os Pobres Agradecidos

Henry Ossawa Tanner painted this in 1894, in a United States where popular images of Black Americans were mostly cruel caricature, minstrel cartoons and comic postcards. Against that, he painted an old man and a boy, likely grandfather and grandson, bowing their heads to say grace over a bare table. The light falls on their hands and faces and lets the rest of the room go dim. Tanner was the son of a minister, and he had just come home from studying in Paris, more sure of what his pictures could do. This was one of the last everyday scenes of Black life he made before he turned almost entirely to biblical subjects and moved back to France for good. In the years that followed he became the first African American artist to win wide recognition in the European art world.