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The Banjo Lesson, by Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1893.
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Oil painting of an older gentleman, with his young student sitting on his lap, while he teaches a lesson on the banjo.

Credit: Hampton University Museum, Hampton, Virginia.

A graduate of the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, African-American painter Henry Ossawa Tanner based his painting, The Banjo Lesson,1893, on a poem by Paul Lawrence Dunbar. Convinced that his race would inhibit his career in the United States, Tanner moved to Paris in 1895, where he enjoyed a successful career as a painter, primarily of religious scenes.

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