February 20, 2022 - Edward Bannister

We turn to another landscape artist today, February 20, 2022, as Lyles Station Historic School and Museum recognizes the talented artist, Edward Bannister, the first African American artist to receive a national award. Bannister earned national recognition for his pastoral landscapes depicting the peaceful tranquility of nature.
We don’t know a great deal about Bannister’s childhood but do know he was orphaned before he was sixteen, leaving him as a foster with a white family. After he moved out, he worked briefly as a ship’s cook and as an actor. He began working as a barber in the 1850s when he lived in Boston and took painting classes in the evenings at the Lowell Institute.
However, after he moved to Rhode Island, his painting career accelerated, following the intervention of his wife, Christiana Carteaux.
Lewis Hayden, an African-American abolitionist leader, welcomed the Bannisters into his home where they lived and worked with him. Bannister studied photography and earned his living as a photographer, then after the Civil War, the couple moved to Providence, Rhode Island where Christiana Bannister opened another hairdressing salon. In 1870, she told her husband to quit his job and focus on his art. It paid off.
As Bannister related, “I would have made out very poorly had it not been for her. My greatest successes have come through her, either through her criticisms of my pictures, or the advice she would give me in the matter of placing them in public.”
Bannister’s paintings were well-received and began to sell, and he exhibited his paintings at the Boston Art Club.
In 1876, Bannister garnered more attention than he expected. He entered his landscape Under the Oaks in the Philadelphia Centennial competition.
Under The Oaks won first prize. When he walked on stage to accept the bronze first place medal, the audience and the judges were shocked, for they did not expect an African American to be the artist. They threatened to rescind the award, but the other artists stood behind the decision and threatened to withdraw their work if the judges denied Bannister his prize. Bannister kept his first place medal and sold the four-by-six-foot painting of sheep and oak trees for $1,500, almost $41,000 in today’s economy. While the painting has since been lost in history, Bannister definitely found his place in it.
Bannister and his work were in demand, and the couple enjoyed financial success, moving from the boarding house into their own home and purchasing his own sailboat which he employed when he painted seascapes.
Bannister approached his art as a spiritual activity, one in line with his deep Christian faith. On a cold January night in 1901 when he was attending a prayer meeting at the Elmwood Avenue Free Baptist Christ, he suffered a heart attack and passed away. His last words were, “Jesus, help me.”
Bannister’s headstone honors both his art and his faith and was designed by his friends in the art community. The large rock with carved palette is inscribed with the following:
“Friends of this pure and lofty sold, freed from the form which lies beneath the sod, have placed this stone to mark the grave of him, who while he portrayed nature, walked with God.”
Tomorrow, we will meet his wife and explore the importance of her life and career.