1/6/23 - Acquisition - Worcester, Art Museum - Slavery had been abolished for almost thirty years when Edward Mitchell Bannister painted this work, which at first sight seems to depict an idyllic nature or at least a picturesque country landscape bathed in pink light. But in the background, African-American farm workers are gathering hay. Bannister was influenced by Millet’s art, which he felt expressed so well "the sad, uncomplaining life he saw about him - and with which he sympathized so deeply. [1]". Nevertheless, this painting not only depicts the peasant world in late nineteenth-century America, it is tinged with a political undertone and indirectly denounces the empty promises of the post-Civil War Reconstruction period, by suggesting the still-vibrant racial oppression and exploitation of labour in Rhode Island, particularly in South County where most of the state’s plantations were located.
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- Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828–1901)
The Hay Gatherers, c. 1893
Oil on canvas - 44.5 × 59.7 cm
Worcester, Art Museum
Photo : WAM - See the image in its page
This painting is one of the most famous by the African-American painter. It was in the collection of Dr Nicholas Bruno and was purchased in 2023 by the Worcester Art Museum, which did not own any of Bannister’s works. Although Bannister defended the rights of African-Americans, he rarely addressed the subject in his paintings. He was criticised for this, particularly by the artists of the Harlem Renaissance during the inter-war period. But how to show African-American identity while adapting to the tastes of the time and making a living from his art?
Regardless of its subject and its author, this painting entitled The Hay Gatherers has its own artistic qualities and bears witness to the influence of both the Barbizon School and the Hudson River School. It is currently on show in a temporary exhibition at the museum entitled "Frontiers of Impressionism" until 25 June, when it will be added to the permanent collections.
Born in Canada, Edward Mitchell Bannister lived in New England, first in Boston and then in Providence. He worked on boats and in hairdressing salons before making a living from his paintbrush. Partly self-taught, he nevertheless studied at the Lowell Institute, taking anatomy classes with the sculptor William Rimmer, and during this period became friends with the portrait painter John Nelson Arnold.
He received invaluable help from a patron, the African-American doctor John van Salee de Grasse, who commissioned his first works, seascapes and portraits.
He earned his living as a photographer, and eventually established himself as a painter. In Boston, he rubbed shoulders with the African-American artistic community, notably the sculptor Edmonia Lewis, thus the portrait painters William Simpson and Nelson A. Primus.
Bannister painted portraits, a few genre scenes and still lifes, as well as rare history paintings, but it was his landscapes that made him a success. He discovered the Barbizon School through the works of William Morris Hunt, who travelled to Europe in the 1850s, brought back French paintings and exhibited his own paintings in Boston in the 1860s. The Hudson River School also influenced Bannister, depicting an idealised wilderness in which man lives in harmony. His landscapes, however, tended more towards the picturesque and did not seek to convey nationalist grandeur.
Living in Providence from 1871, he was a member of the abolitionist movement, taught at the Rhode Island School of Design and founded the Providence Art Club with George Whitaker and Charles Walter Stetson. He won first prize for painting at the Philadelphia World’s Fair in 1876 with a painting now lost Under the Oaks. He was careful to include only his name, without specifying his origins.