The Thankful Poor

What you are looking at

An old man and a boy sit at a small table covered with a worn cloth, heads bowed in prayer before a meal. The man, white-haired and bearded, in a dark vest and white shirt, rests his forehead on his clasped hands. The boy, across the corner of the table, covers his eyes with one hand. Between them: a few plates, cups, a white pitcher and a dish of food. Light pours in from a curtained window at the left and spreads across the bare plaster wall behind them, turning it gold and cream.

It is a quiet picture. No one moves, and the meal has not yet begun.

Tanner in 1893–94

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), the leading African American painter of his generation, had moved to Paris in 1891. Illness brought him home to Philadelphia in 1893, and there he painted two scenes of Black domestic life: The Banjo Lesson (1893) and The Thankful Poor (1894). Both show an older man and a child, and both turn on the passing of something, music or faith, from one generation to the next. They were based partly on photographs and studies Tanner had made earlier.

Tanner's father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and the painting has been linked to the church's emphasis on gratitude and to the family's belief in dignity and education. Tanner wrote of wanting to show Black Americans seriously and sympathetically, against the comic stereotypes common in American art at the time.

The Thankful Poor was his last known genre scene of this kind. After returning to France, he turned to biblical subjects, and he became famous for them.

Close looking

The wall is the most striking passage. Tanner paints it in quick, broken, vertical strokes of yellow, white and pale blue, a texture that owes something to his time in France, and the light seems to vibrate on it. Against that brightness, the figures are built up more solidly, in warm browns.

Look at the hands. The man's are knotted and pressed together; the boy's hand screens his face completely. Notice too the stool under the boy and the chair behind the man, both plain and worn. Tanner gives the bare setting the same care as a church interior.

Provenance and where to see it

The painting was bought in 1894 by John T. Morris, who gave it to the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf; it was rediscovered there in 1970. Bill and Camille Cosby bought it at Sotheby's in 1981, and in 2020 it was acquired by Art Bridges, Alice Walton's foundation, which lends it to museums. A study is at the DuSable Museum in Chicago.

For other images of devotion see Light Academia, and compare the American Thanksgiving imagery of Freedom From Want and The First Thanksgiving.