Henry Ossawa Tanner was a late Nineteenth Century painter who trained with Thomas Eakins but moved to Paris so he could live more freely as a black man than he could in the United States. He is best known for “The Banjo Player” which critics say gives a more humane account of a black man teaching his grandchild to play the banjo than did William Sidney Mount’s painting of the same name from a half century earlier. But reading in moral messages about what a black painter might try to do with a painting that is different from what a white artist might do is beside the point, the point being what Tanner does do as an artist, how he composes and colors his painting and so gives it a distinctive life. The important thing about Tanner’s “The Banjo Player” is the white splotch of light in the right hand corner where various utilitarian objects, towels and crockery, are to be observed, and the contrast between that and the shadowy nature of the rest of the painting, it all suffused in a bluish glow. In fact, Tanner’s success as an artist is his use of blue tones, as those are set against white ones, in so many of his paintings. They are his distinctive signature as an artist.