African American artist Edward Bannister (1828-1901), though never afforded the opportunity of studying in a formal academic setting, earned praise and many honors for his New England landscape paintings.

Edward Bannister was a prominent New England landscape painter of the nineteenth century and enjoyed a career notable for the lack of prejudice with which it was judged. The African-American artist, though regretting to his death that he was not given a chance to study his art in a formal academic setting, nevertheless succeeded admirably and won great acclaim in his day. Sadly, most of his works did not survive the ages, but an essay on his work in A History of African-American Artists, from 1790 to the Present, described him as "a professional artist who lived by his painting.... Bannister painted primarily what he knew intimately--the somber blue-gray skies with breezy white cumulus clouds in the late afternoon and...