J19: The Journal of Nineteenth-Century Americanists

The First Lion: Henry Ossawa Tanner painted his first lion in 1880, when he was twenty years old, still a student of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and fourteen years before he moved to France to escape the personal and [End Page 259]

professional humiliations imposed by racial segregation. In a particularly egregious story told by one of his white classmates at the academy, Tanner was punished when he began to "assert himself": "One night his easel was carried out into the middle of Broad Street and, though not painfully crucified, he was firmly tied to it and left there."¹ "Pomp" at the Zoo (fig. 2), a depiction of a lion named Pompeii staring back at a crowd of menacing, faceless spectators, seems at once detached from such scenes of torture and intended to be read as a meditation on racial segregation. Bathed in light and wide eyed like a movie star annoyed by the paparazzi, the lion seems both frightened and disdainful of the crowd. "Why do you torment me?" he seems to say. At the same time, it's difficult to imagine Tanner, with his seriousness and artistic ambition, being quite so reductive an allegorist.

The Second Lion: Tanner's second version of this lion (Pomp at the Philadelphia Zoo), a close-up of Pompeii's world-weary face as he [End Page 260] looks out past the viewer into the middle distance, is less cartoonish and thus harder to read in allegorical terms. In a twist of fate that Tanner would surely have appreciated, this painting was acquired in 2020 by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Remarking on the acquisition, Anna Marley, the museum's curator of American art, observed that "Henry Ossawa Tanner created the painting … while an advanced student here at PAFA … This warm and engaging painting of Pomp the lion is the PAFA collection's first painting by Tanner to have been created while the artist was living in Philadelphia. I can think of no better home for this painting and it is a thrill to welcome it into the collection."² And so the lion is honored, 130-odd years after his exile.

The Third and Fourth Lions: Tanner's third lion is lost. Dewey Mosby explains that Tanner's "debut" at the National Academy of Design in New York prompted one of Tanner's first sales—of a painting entitled Lion at Home—in the mid-1880s. Its location is currently "unknown," and I like to think that it is hanging in a living room somewhere and will, perhaps, reappear one day to much excitement on Antiques Roadshow.³ Lion Licking Its Paw, a painting produced at around the same time, prompted William J. Simmons (who included Tanner in his 1887 Men of Mark: Eminent, Progressive and Rising) to claim that the "fierceness" of the lion was "so natural" that he considered running for the door.⁴ Animal paintings were an early passion of Tanner, who went through a number of distinct phases in his career, as if trying out and then discarding different identities. Beginning with scenes of shipwrecks, he turned to landscapes, and then to genre painting, including the scenes of Black American life for which he is, in American circles, still best known. This period ended abruptly and mysteriously, to the dismay of civil rights activists, who had hoped that Tanner would continue in this vein, combatting the racist images that dominated American genre painting.⁵ By the end of the 1890s, Tanner had devoted himself to painting biblical scenes, from The Resurrection of Lazarus, whose purchased by the French government for the Musée du Luxembourg in 1897 made him internationally famous, to Return from the Crucifixion, his last signed painting, completed in 1937. Amid these changes, Tanner's passion for lions held surprisingly steady.

The Fifth...