According to some scholars, religion is inseparable from the African-American experience. Others viewed race as almost a separate ontological category from religion. How can it be possible for scholars to view the relationship between race and religion so differently? “Henry Ossawa Tanner: Race, Religion, and Visual Mysticism” seeks to understand the complex relationship between religion and race and to explore Tanner’s visual mysticism by examining his life and paintings. Tanner was an African-American artist in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whose body of work consisted of landscapes, genre paintings, and religious narratives. It will be argued that he considered his religious paintings to be his most important work.

The case of Henry Ossawa Tanner, his life and art, demonstrates the dialectical relationship between race and religion. These two identities were in conversation with each other in his life and in his art. Tanner was shaped by his African Methodist Episcopal background, which provided the religious lens through which he viewed life and drew inspiration for his art. Tanner also faced racism, because he was an African-American artist in the time period when to be such was an anomaly, and criticism from his peers because he chose to paint religious themes instead of racial ones. Despite criticism, Tanner remained devoted to his religious works, and many proposed that Tanner was a mystic. This thesis will promote that Tanner was not only a mystic but also a visual mystic by painting on canvas his religious experience and its universal elements. The artist hoped to communicate religious experience to the viewers of his paintings, and he desired to demonstrate the interconnectedness of the world and the interaction between divinity and humanity. For Tanner, painting was a way to connect to viewers, but it was also an act of religious devotion the moment his brush touched the canvas.