I will preach with my brush ~ Henry Ossawa Tanner

I decided on the spot that I would be an artist, and I assure you, it was no ordinary artist I had in mind.~ Henry Ossawa Tanner

Henry Ossawa Tanner was an American artist and the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. Tanner moved to Paris, France, in 1891 to study, and continued to live there after being accepted in French artistic circles.

Tanner's work was influential during his career; he has been called "the greatest African American painter to date.

His father was a prominent minister and his mother a former slave who escaped the South through the Underground Railroad. 

Tanner's Sand Dunes at Sunset, Atlantic City (c. 1885; oil on canvas) hangs in the Green Room at the White House; it is the first painting by an African-American artist to have been purchased for the permanent collection of the White House. The painting is a landscape with a "view across the cool gray of a shadowed beach to dunes made pink by the late afternoon sunlight. A low haze over the water partially hides the sun." It was bought for $100,000 by the White House Endowment Fund during the Bill Clinton administration from Dr. Rae Alexander-Minter, grandniece of the artist