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Tanner's personal vision; and that Tanner's religious painting was not necessarily a refuge from the burdens of the world, or his responsibilities as a Negro artist.

In recent years with the perodic shifts in sensibility, Tanner along with Gerome, Bastian-Lepage, Constant and other artists of the 19th Century Salons, has been consigned to the basement storage rooms of the great museums. There, he and the others, await some Huntington Hartford to sound the trumpet call of artistic resurrection. However, several of Tanner's late works as, "Gate of Tangiers" and his very last painting "Return from the Crucifixion", evolve such beauty in the integration of method and subject matter, that if more such paintings were assembled, reframed, shown at the proper time, the art world might rediscover a good, but neglected painter. 

Shortly after his student days at the Pennsylvania Academy, Tanner left this country to study in Paris. Except for short visits to America he remained in Europe the rest of his life. Not only Tanner but four of the other artist in this exhibit; Robert Duncanson, Edmonia Lewis, Annie E. Walker, and Eugene Warburg either lived or stayed for long periods abroad. 

In some autobiographical material that Tanner had prepared, he tells of his constant harassment by fellow students at the Pennsylvania Academy. Were it not for the encouragement and counsel of an older Philadelphia artist who befriended him, Tanner would not have continued his studies. In th [[strikethrough]] is [[/strikethrough]] at time, what few Negroes did find the means to study art, were denied admission to most art schools. The schools that did accept Negroes, usually denied them admission