colored people of her city and country have been as direct, as soul-stirring, as eloquent, as those by any man in the same behalf." When it is remembered that she had frequently appeared on the same platform with Isaiah C. Wears, John M. Langston, Robert Purvis and Frederick Douglass, such a tribute can be estimated at its true valuation. Her lectures and public addresses delivered in principal cities were given, not for pecuniary gain, but in response to a call to service. Her personality would have won her high civic recognition had she been of the other sex and race.

At a political gathering in Philadelphia... the mayor of the city was one of the speakers on the platform. She made one of her soul-stirring, effective speeches that those who heard her will long remember. The mayor was so touched by her earnestness and cultured mind that he purposely sought some means of showing his appreciation and appointed her the first instance of its kind-a member of a Board of City Examiners for clerical officers.

She has acted as an interpreter of French in court, and was for a time one of the directory of the "Old Folks' Home," located in West Philadelphia.

In 1888 she visited England to attend the Missionary Congress as a representative of the Sarah Allen Mission. So eloquently did she plead the cause that the Duke of Somerset arose and commended her in glowing terms for her eloquence and the cause that she so ably represented.

In 1881 at the height of her career, she was married to Rev. Levi J. Coppin, formerly a student at the school. The service was performed in Washington at the Nineteenth Street Baptist Church, in which many of her girlish days were spent, and of which Mrs. Clark, her aunt, then a resident of Washington, was an influential member. Besides the reception tendered there by friends and a host of former pupils identified with the life of Washington, there were receptions held in Baltimore, in which

Rev. Coppin was a pastor, and in Philadelphia, the scene of and center of the activities of the bride and groom for so many years.

In 1900 her husband was elected bishop and assigned to work in South Africa. There was no hesitation in her mind as to her duty, although well-meaning friends doubted whether it was wise for her to risk her health in journeying 11,000 miles to the Dark Continent. But she resigned her connection with the Institute at Philadelphia and began as ardently in South Africa the work of laying the foundation of Bethel Institute at Capetown, as at the Institute in the "City of Brotherly Love" thirty years before.

As an evidence of the world-wide influence she wielded as teacher in the Institute for Colored Youth, on her arrival in South Africa, she, to her unbounded surprise, met those who had been under her tutelage 11,000 miles away.

She did not write out her speeches and lectures, but it being her purpose to publish a work on the Science of Teaching, for which her ample notes made for her class-room work afforded a basis unlike that of the average text-book in pedagogics. She spent the last months of her life in preparing "Reminiscences of School Life and Notes on Teaching."

Certain it is that no career is more encouraging to the deserving colored woman than that of Fanny M. Jackson Coppin, so basis unlike that of the average text-book in pedagogics, she passed away January 21, 1913, at her home in Philadelphia.

XXXIII

HENRY OSAWA TANNER

In an address by Rev. William Henry Channing, dedicatory of the Miner School Building at the National Capital, the possibilities of the Negro race in the Fine Arts were foretold with all the perfect confidence of one divinely intrusted with the secrets of the future. Those who listened to this remarkable address must have been not only charmed and thrilled, but reconciled to all the galling and disheartening conditions of proscription and persecution as this seer took a peep into the future when musicians of power, poets of recognized beauty, and painters of marvelous touch would be among the heritage of this race.

At that time Paul Laurence Dunbar was clinging to his mother's skirts in Dayton, Ohio; Samuel Coleridge-Taylor was prattling in London within echo of Dr. Channing's sermons, and Henry Osawa Tanner, born at Pittsburg, June 21, 1859, when Old John Brown, for whom he was named, was prospecting near Harper's Ferry,—had just overcome his struggles between love and duty in determining his future career.

His father, Bishop Benjamin T. Tanner, editor of the Christian Recorder, lived near Fairmount Park in Philadelphia. One day while accompanying his father the sight of an artist painting from nature greeted their sight. "Oh, papa," exclaimed the boy, "I can do just what that man is doing!" "I know I can," he repeated with ecstasy.

This was one of the earliest revelations of the bent of the boy's mind. Paint, brushes and canvas were given him and he

became busy. One of his first sketches, still preserved in the family, was a landscape in which conventionalities of color, perspective and grouping were subordinated for other striking indications of unusual artistic talent.

Other evidences of the boy's penchant were exhibited in his fondness for mathematics and drawing. To such a degree was this shown that he was one of the few school pupils named to receive instruction in drawing.

Delicate of frame and constitution, studious at school and being the oldest child, considerable solicitude was manifested by both parents as to his future career. Quite naturally they urged him to look to the ministry; but obedient as he was in all other respects, Henry had made up his mind to be an artist and nothing else. He told his parents that though he could not gratify their wish for him to be a minister, he would do as much for their religion with his brush as he ever could do by his voice. And so the sequel has proven.

To accomplish his ambition to be an artist he was perfectly willing to make any struggle or endure any hardship. He would even wear clothes long after they should have been replaced by others, not because he was at all slovenly in dress, but because of his independence.

He had a few or no companions except his artist friends whom he would meet at the Academy of Fine Arts while in the pursuit of his studies or his visits to the art galleries.

Sculpture strongly appealed to him and the boy frequently spent many an hour at the Zoological Park modeling from animals. So excellent was this work that it secured him privileges denied except to artists and art students.

It was at Atlantic City late in the eighties where the public first learned of his artistic talent.

After receiving instructions from such celebrated artists as Thomas Eakins and Thomas Hovenden, and having realized several hundred dollars from the sale of his pictures and bits of

sculpture, he went to Paris in 1891 where, under the tutelage of Jean Paul Laurens and Benjamin Constant, he made steady progress in his art studies to such a degree that he became known to the art world as one of the foremost of American artists.

During his life in Paris his earliest studies partook there as in America largely of his environment, as a glance at their titles shows, but these are not those on which his reputation as a painter will rest. They were nevertheless training his powers in a direction and in a field in which he stands out as one of the first artists of France and Europe.

A canvas bearing his name "The Music Lesson" was admitted to the Salon in 1894 and when he gained an entrance the next year, with "The Young Sabot Maker," his picture was given an obscure position, but it met the eye of Gérôme, the great artist, who insisted and secured for it a position on the line. Afterwards Gérôme, who had not met Mr. Tanner, saw him and told the rising artist what he had done.

Before that

In 1896 Mr. Tanner won an honorable mention. honorable mention another American artist strolling through the Salon with some friends pointed out excellences that the jury later confirmed. That artist accordingly raised himself in their estimation.

The next year, 1897, found Mr. Tanner at the Salon with the "Raising of Lazarus," a painting that at once attracted the attention of the public and the critics for its dramatic power, its unconventional, yet graphic treatment. It is thus described by the Paris correspondent of the New York Times:

"He places the scene of his painting in the dark cavern of Bethany, the immediate foreground at the right showing Lazarus himself, half reclining on the stone floor, as he struggles back to life. The mark of death is upon him, and the grave clothes show white and livid in the gloom of the little cavern at Bethany. Without being theatrical or sensational, the representation of