Edward Mitchell Bannister, Sur le Seekonk replica and original

 

Edward Mitchell Bannister was born in New Brunswick in 1828, he was an accomplished artist who spent time in the US. As a black man, his art career faced many hurdles, for example one of his paintings won a prize but when the jury found out who he was they tried to renege. Perusing his artwork on the internet and wikipedia page, he did portrait work, and painted amazing landscapes in what might be called the pastoral style. In this style, rolling hillsides are dotted with trees, lakes, and rivers, with the occasional sheep or rural worker. Later in his career his work veered towards impressionism, which may well have been due to the time frame of his career overlapping the likes of Monet and Van Gogh. In the painting you see above, I replicated his watercolour from 1892 in order to understand the style, composition, and to get a feel for what it was like to paint over 100 years ago. The original watercolour you see below, he painted in 1892 as a preliminary sketch, probably in preparation for a larger work since he was known to produce sketches and colour studies before doing a large oil painting.

From reading  Handprint.com I knew that 19th century watercolour painters had to use very hard cakes of pigment that were difficult to extract colour from. I had a few of those from Stoneground paint a Canadian company, and they were indeed hard to activate and get pigment on the brush. As a result, you can see the  general pallor of colour in the original version, as compared to the brightness of my modern replica. In fact, I had to reign in the intensity of the colours to get down to a low saturation point. Bannister's painting used a lot of yellow ochre and viridian, and what appears to be raw sienna. The sky has a faint purplish tinge which could have been dilute cobalt blue but it is hard to tell. I have much more powerful greens in the phthalo category, but those were not on the art market until the mid 20th century. He used classical compositional geometry, the left side of the painting is divided into exact 1/3 segments (sky, mid ground, foreground), and the horizon line on the right is on the exact half way mark, as if measured by a ruler. I particularly liked the sun penetrating through the hazy overcast sky, which I embellished in a more colourful manner in the replica. I enjoyed learning about his style and hope that more black artists can get the credit that they probably deserved more of at the time, even if is retrospectively. If I could find any pastoral scenes in Montreal I would go paint them, but alas all I can find around here are sidewalks, cars, and condos!

Sur le Seekonk Replica, 8 x 10 hot press watercolour, November 2023 (No. 2687b)

The original : Sur le Seekonk, watercolour by Edward Mitchell Bannister, (1892)