Biography on edward bannister

Edward Mitchell Bannister (ca. 1828 – January 9, 1901) was a Black Canadian painter whose tonalism and predominantly pastoral subject matter owed much to his admiration for Millet and the French Barbizon School.

Biography

Bannister was born in St.

Andrews, New Brunswick and moved to New England in the late 1840s, where he remained for the rest of his life. While Bannister was well known in the artistic community of his adopted home of Providence, Rhode Island and admired within the wider East Coast art world (he won a bronze medal for his large oil "Under the Oaks" at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial), he was largely forgotten for almost a century for a complexity of reasons, principally connected with racial prejudice.

With the ascendency of the Civil Rights movement in the 1970s, his work was again celebrated and collected.

In 1978, Rhode Island College dedicated its Art Gallery in Bannister's name with the exhibition: "Four From Providence ~ Alston, Bannister, Jennings & P