By Soren Sorensen
Next time you’re out walking, look around for plaques, engraved stone or other prominent signage in and around building entrances, beneath statues or on park benches. You’ll run across countless names, some likely familiar to you but maybe many more that are unfamiliar. College campuses are perfect for this. At Rhode Island College, there are buildings named for Horace Mann, John Clarke, Craig Lee and Mary Tucker Thorpe. Every building is seemingly named for someone, and each individual namesake has a story—some more singular and improbable than the others. Such is the curious case of Edward Mitchell Bannister, the namesake of Rhode Island College’s E.M. Bannister Gallery.
You’ll find the eleven-hundred-square-foot space inside the building named for Dennis J. Roberts, Rhode Island’s sixty-third governor. Roberts Hall houses many other important facilities—the Auditorium at Roberts Hall and Human Resources among them—but Bannister Gallery and the story of the painter for which it is named are a little different.
Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in 1828 in St. Andrews, New Brunswick, Canada. Though his mother’s race is unknown, his father was from Barbados in the West Indies. By 1844, both of Bannister’s parents were dead and, by 1850, he was living in Boston. Between odd jobs, including a stint as a cook at sea, Bannister learned to paint, met and married a wealthy Rhode Island woman named Christiana Carteaux in 1857 and moved to Providence in 1870. With that move, Rhode Island became Edward Mitchell Bannister’s adopted home.
Known primarily for landscapes, Bannister was drawn to the gauzy realism of the Barbizon School, a mid-nineteenth century French movement that included Jean François Millet, Gustave Courbet and Jean-Baptiste-Camille Corot. Bannister never attended Rhode Island College. He had little artistic training to speak of—the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 would probably have prohibited him from visiting a museum.
So it often comes as a shock to people when they learn that he became the one of the nation’s first famous black painters. His persona looms so large today, Bannister Gallery Director James Montford told Tribe, it sometimes obscures the man behind the history. “I think the sense of him being human has sort of not really been embraced,” Montford said. “He was an abolitionist. He worked with William Lloyd Garrison [publisher of The Liberator] and he was probably sitting around a table with all those folks as an equal, having those conversations. And that’s fascinating to think about.”
A discussion of Edward Mitchell Bannister’s life would be incomplete without mention of his wife Christiana and her substantial influence on him. Ray Rickman, president of the Rickman Group and former State Representative from the College Hill area of Providence told Tribe, “My favorite feminist statement, which isn’t a feminist statement, was made by Edward Bannister: ‘Without her, I would have been nothing.’ She was wealthy,” Rickman said. “Probably the wealthiest black woman in Rhode Island.”
A few years before they were married, Bannister worked for his future wife in a beauty salon she owned on Washington Street in Boston. She sold restorative hair treatments, perhaps not unlike Adolfo Pirelli’s “miracle elixir” in Steven Sondheim’s Sweeney Todd. “She sold product,” Rickman said. “You know, hair straightener and the like.” An enthusiastic guardian of local black history and all things Bannister, Rickman told Tribe that for years he’s been looking for one of the empty containers that once held product sold by Christiana Carteaux. “I’d just love to find one,” Rickman said. “I don’t know where they are but she sold thousands of them.”
“Edward Bannister,” Rickman said, “was in a very unique position because he was younger than her and she bought him a yacht so he could sail and paint from the water. He was just a lucky man,” Rickman added.
Montford agrees. “He was supported by several local patrons and he did make money from his art. But his wife really was the breadwinner. He was a husband,” Montford said and added with a laugh, “I just have this vision of them sitting at the breakfast table having a conversation like, ‘I got this award down in Philadelphia. What are we going to do?’”
The award in question was Bannister’s first-prize medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition in 1876. Officially named the “International Exhibition of Arts, Manufactures and Products of the Soil and Mine,” the six-month event was attended by one fifth of the United States population and was the nation’s first World’s Fair. The painting competition was to be decided without the use of artist’s names or biographical information but when the judges became aware of Bannister’s race, they wanted to strip him of first prize. Bannister’s competitors, fellow painters, insisted that the award be upheld. The winning painting, Under the Oaks, is now lost.
“The painter who came in second,” Ray Rickman told Tribe, “said ‘I won’t take [first prize],’ and they probably caved because they didn’t know how to do the judging over again.” Rickman continued, “This was the racism of the day. It was a blind competition and the first national competition ever,” and added, “This was very, very important.”
Rickman imagines that the wind at Bannister’s back—his new national notoriety—must have certainly helped push the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD) into existence in 1877. But, as Rickman is careful to point out, Bannister was not the school’s founder. “All kinds of black scholars say that Bannister was the founder of RISD and it’s not true. He influenced it,” Rickman continued, “because probably if [Helen Adelia Rowe Metcalf and the Centennial Women] hadn’t been in Philadelphia in 1876 they wouldn’t have come right back and done it.”
In some ways, Bannister seems to have led a charmed existence, even given his relatively modest upbringing. He was better equipped to assert himself and speak on his own behalf than most artists of color. “His advantage,” said Montford, “was that he was an international person. He came from another country. Slavery was still an institution and he came into this country as a free person. He didn’t come from an experience of servitude. He had traveled a little bit. His position in life,” Montford reiterated, “was greatly enhanced by the fact that he was from another country.”
In 1880, Bannister and a small group of Rhode Island artists and collectors, both professional and amateur, founded the Providence Art Club, the second oldest group of its kind in the United States. Alice K. Miles, who served as the Club’s president from 1997 until 2000, told Tribe, “The Salmagundi Club was founded a few years prior to the Providence Art Club. They were the first art club in the United States, but we were the first to include women.”
Miles, who was the Club’s first and so far only woman president, showed Tribe two of the Club’s Bannister works: The Woodsman (center) and Meadow Landscape. The Club also possesses the original certificate from Bannister’s 1876 triumph at the Philadelphia Centennial Exhibition.
Bannister’s works, sparsely populated and frequently rural and outdoor, owe as much to the Barbizon School of mid-nineteenth century painters as to any other movement that his life and career overlapped, Impressionism and Post-Impressionism among them. Of his influences, Miles said, “I guess Courbet was the first painter of light in the Barbizon school. You’ll find these dark, woodland scenes but there’s a little trace of light behind the trees,” she said and added, “Corot is another one.”
“American painters,” Miles continued, “painted in France. They went to the Sorbonne. They went to Munich and Holland. And they went to the Barbizon.”
Though Bannister never studied in Europe, his American tonalism exhibits characteristics of the Barbizon school. “I think it was the time,” Miles told Tribe, “Many painters in Providence were working in the Barbizon tradition,” she said citing Charles Walter Stetson and George William Whitaker.
Ray Rickman concluded that, in terms of notoriety, Bannister ranks among Rhode Island’s most famous artists, alongside Gilbert Stuart, responsible for the George Washington portrait on the dollar bill. “More collectors have Sydney Burleighs than Bannisters. People have more Maxwell Mays than both Burleigh and Bannister combined,” Rickman said and added, “but Bannister is probably the third or fourth most collected Rhode Island artist.”
Edward Mitchell Bannister died in 1901 and the inscription on his grave marker at North Burial Ground in Providence reads: “Friends of this pure and lofty soul, 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.”
Thanks in part to the civil rights movement, interest in Bannister’s work rose sharply in the 1970s. Rhode Island College named its gallery for him in 1978. The E.M. Bannister Gallery has operated ceaselessly ever since, featuring between eight and ten exhibitions every year..
Images provided by the Providence Art Club.
