biography of Edward Mitchell BANNISTER (1833-1901)

Birth place: St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada

Death place: Providence, RI

Addresses: Boston, 1850-70; Providence, RI, from 1871

Profession: Landscape, marine, portrait, and genre painter

Studied: Drawing and anatomy with Dr. William Rimmer, Lowell Inst., Boston c.1863-65

Exhibited: Centennial Exh., Phila., 1876 (bronze med. for "Under the Oaks"); NAD, 1879; Boston Athenaeum; Boston AC, 1873, 1877-79, 1881-83, 1891; RISD Mus.; Howard Univ.; Providence Art Club, 1901 (memorial); Nat'l Center of Afro-American Artists, Boston, 1972

Member: Providence Art Club (founder)

Work: NMAA ("Under the Oaks" and others); Brown Univ. ("Sabin Point on the Narragansett Shore, 1885); RISD

Comments: He was among the earliest Rhode Island landscape painters ó and the first African-American artist ó to win national recognition. He was son of a black man from Barbados (who died in 1830) and a white woman from Canada. He sketched from childhood and may have worked as a cook on Northeast trading ships while a young man. In 1848, he settled in Boston where he was a barber, and married Christiana Carteaux of North Kingstown, RI, the owner of several hair salons in Boston. The couple was interested in music and drama, and during the 1850s-60s were very active in the cultural life of Boston's black community. In the early 1860s, he experimented with "solar prints" (possibly daguerrotypes or paper photographs) but by the mid 1860s he was studying under Rimmer and painting landscapes, portraits, religious, and genre subjects. By 1870, when he and his wife moved to Providence, his landscapes were showing the influence of the Barbizon style, and his work reached maturity, infused with his spiritual and emotional responses to nature.

Sources: G&W; Providence Journal, Jan. 11, 1901. More recently, see Gerdts, Art Across America, vol. 2: 94-96 (repro.); Driskell, Hidden Heritage, 19-21; Hartigan, Sharing Traditions, 71-72; Naylor, NAD; Cederholm, Afro-American Artists; Rbt. Workman, The Eden of America (RISD, 1986, p.66)