By the turn of the 20th century, Henry Ossawa Tanner had attained wide recognition as the most successful and talented Black artist of his time. Born in 1859 on the eve of the Civil War, he died in 1937 in the imminent shadow of World War II. Yet he never painted pictures of conflict or warfare.

Rather, he would be known for genre subjects of Black life, landscapes and religious themes. The last doubtless drew inspiration from his father’s profession as an influential African Methodist Episcopal bishop in Pennsylvania. Tanner was born in Pittsburgh and moved as a child to Philadelphia.

He showed an early interest in art, which led to his enrollment at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts from 1880 to 1882. There he studied with Thomas Eakins, America’s greatest painter of portraits and the human figure. Tanner soon secured work as an illustrator, and exhibited his first paintings at the National Academy in New York.

In 1888 he moved to Atlanta to teach at Clark University for a year. With the failure of Reconstruction and the resurgence of racial discrimination, he left for Paris in 1891, where he would work for much of the rest of his life. Tanner entered the Académie Julien and showed his work at the Salon.

At this time he painted some of his most sensitive images of African-American life, most notably “The Banjo Lesson” (1893). In it he shows an elderly Black man with a young boy, likely his grandson, on his lap, holding a banjo. The themes are not only learning but devotion and thoughtfulness—seen in the juxtaposition of age and youth in their two faces side by side. This quiet meditation is equally evident in the presentation of Tanner’s mother four years later.

Honors soon followed: One biblical painting, “Daniel in the Lion’s Den,” was awarded a silver medal at the Universal Exposition in 1900; on another occasion, a second painting, “The Raising of Lazarus,” won a third-class medal. The French government purchased the latter for the Luxembourg Gallery. Sponsors supported Tanner’s travel to the Holy Land in 1897-98, and over the subsequent decade he was awarded other major prizes.

In Paris at the peak of his powers, he decided in 1897 to paint “Portrait of the Artist’s Mother.” The work, now in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, would be a combination of Whistler and Eakins. One provided the form, the other its content. James McNeill Whistler had painted the famous portrait of his own mother, “Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1,” in 1871. Subsequently acquired by the French government, it was the most important work by an American artist to be shown in Paris, and would have been well known to Tanner during his years there.

Like Tanner’s image, the painting known as “Whistler’s Mother” was a monochromatic work, but more in gradations of gray, whereas Tanner would stress the contrasts of extreme light and dark. For him Blackness was about both race and interiority.

Whistler treated his subject as a figural still life, her animate form in contrast to the strong rectangles of the wall and print nearby. Tanner’s mother, Sarah, also sits in profile, but we are much more aware of her pose of reflection and psychological presence. Eakins was masterly at rendering the textures of clothing and human anatomy as well as a sense of inner emotion or vision. Tanner rose here to his mentor’s level of accomplishment.

Eakins had occasionally employed the profile format over the course of his career, and several examples were no doubt familiar to Tanner from his earlier years in Philadelphia. Most pertinent is “The Artist’s Wife and His Setter Dog” (1884-89), depicting Susan McDowell Eakins seated in profile but with her face turned outward to the viewer. Tanner has his mother, in profile, facing directly ahead. Her right arm rests on the arm of her rocking chair, holding a fan, while her left hand is raised to touch her cheek.

Strong lighting from an unidentified source rakes across the composition to illuminate her white shirt cuffs, the shawl cascading behind her back to the floor, and the pale brown of her contemplative face. Like Eakins, Tanner presents her solid form and her mental presence.

In a bold gesture he divides his design in half, with the left nearly empty and the figure occupying the right side. This allows Tanner to balance the abstract with the realistic, the flat with the modeled, the cerebral and the physical.

The artist returned to Philadelphia for a brief visit in 1902, at which time he sat for his own portrait by his old teacher. Eakins perfectly captured his colleague’s sense of an inner vision in one of the strongest and most sympathetic images painted of a Black American.

Back in France, Tanner turned to producing mostly biblical paintings and receiving continued honors. He had his first solo exhibition in America in 1908, and the next year he became the first Black person to be elected to the National Academy. His finest work combined impeccable draftsmanship and painterly richness, creating a solid physical world out of his palette and imbuing it with an aura of the visionary.

—Mr. Wilmerding first wrote about this painting in his “Pelican History of American Art” (1976).