“I believe the Negro blood counts, and counts to my advantage – though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow.” — painter Henry Ossawa Tanner

“I believe the Negro blood counts, and counts to my advantage – though it has caused me at times a life of great humiliation and sorrow.” — painter Henry Ossawa Tanner

It’s his birthday today. When I lived in Philadelphia – a million years ago, with my boyfriend who was in law school at U. Penn – I became intimately familiar with Henry Ossawa Tanner’s paintings since so many of them hang in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and we went to the museum almost every week. Or, at least a couple times a month. It’s such a great museum. Born in Pittsburgh in 1859, Tanner was the first Black artist to break through into …