Edward Mitchell Bannister
THE HUNTINGTON LIBRARY, ART MUSEUM AND BOTANICAL GARDENS
Included in a recent acquisition of several artworks spanning 300 years, is a significant landscape work by African American artist Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901); Untitled (Walking Through a Field). this rare oil painting created circa 1870s, depicts a lush New England landscape scene with a romantic skyscape to match.
“The scene symbolically links past, present and future as a solitary figure traverses a wheat field toward a distant lake,” museum reps continue to describe. “like many of Bannister’s paintings of the last quarter of the 19th century, its subject matter does not present a clear reading.”
The artist, born in Canada, lived as a free man mostly in Boston and then later in Providence, Rhode Island. It’s been noted that only a few of Bannister’s works from the 1850s and 1860s have survived, “preventing a stylistic assessment of his early period in Boston,” reads the Smithsonian American Art Museum website. “[However], while Bannister lived in Boston, he must have seen and been influenced by the Barbizon School-inspired paintings of William Morris Hunt who had studied in Europe and held numerous public exhibitions in Boston during the 1860s.” While Bannister was successful in portraying other subjects like seascapes and still lifes, he is most known for his landscapes, “portraying nature as a clam and submissive force,” says the Smithsonian. “…His paintings are reflective of an artist who loved the quiet beauties of nature and represented them in a realistic manner. Bannister’s middle-period landscapes of the 1870s were generally executed in broad masses of heavy impasto with few details. they also evoke a tranquil mood that became one of the hallmarks of Bannister’s style.”
Dennis Carr, Virginia Steele Scott chief curator of American art at the Huntington, shares that, “Adding Bannister’s Untitled is an important milestone for the collection. It is a major, previously unpublished work made at the height of his career.we are delighted that it will join other works by Black artists in the collection… representing prominent Black American landscape painters of the 19th century.”
Look for Untitled (Walking Through a Field), in upcoming, special exhibitions at the Huntington.