Then a half century ago came E. M. Banister,
the center of a group of artists forming the Rhode
Island Art Club, and one of whose pictures took
a medal at the Centennial Exposition in 1876.
William A. Harper died in 1910. His “Avenue of Poplars” took a prize of $100 at the Chicago Art Institute. William Edward Scott studied in Paris under Tanner. His picture “La Pauvre Voisine” was hung in the salon in 1910 and bought by the government of the Argentine Republic. Another picture was hung in Paris and took first prize at the Indiana State Fair, and a third picture was exhibited in the Royal Academy in London. Lately Mr. Scott has specialized in mural painting. His work is found in ten public schools in Chicago, in four in Indianapolis and in the latter city he decorated two units in the City Hospital with 300 life sized pictures. In many of these pictures he has especially emphasized the Negro type.
Richard Brown, Edwin Harleston, Albert A. Smith, Laura Wheeler and a number of rising young painters have shown the ability of the Negro in this line of art; but their dean is, of course, Henry Ossawa Tanner. Tanner is today one of the leading painters of the world and universally is so recognized. He was born an American Negro in Pittsburgh in 1859, the son of
