Edward Mitchell Bannister

Edward Bannister was a leader in Boston's African American cultural community in the middle of the nineteenth century. In 1870, the artist moved to Rhode Island, where he painted landscapes of pastures, marshes, and forests, seeking "the spiritual...in all created things." Tree Landscape evokes the intimate encounter with nature favored by France's Barbizon painters, but Bannister's belief that God might be found in the humblest aspects of the natural world placed him firmly in the American tradition of landscape painting.