{"id":317,"date":"2021-09-30T17:28:33","date_gmt":"2021-09-30T17:28:33","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/?page_id=317"},"modified":"2026-04-26T01:38:06","modified_gmt":"2026-04-26T01:38:06","slug":"i-am-my-beloveds-my-beloved-is-mine","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/i-am-my-beloveds-my-beloved-is-mine\/","title":{"rendered":"I am my beloved’s, my beloved is mine"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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They met in 1853.<\/p>\n<\/div><\/div>\n\n\n\n

He was eight years her junior, an aspiring painter. She was a businesswoman and abolitionist, a daughter of doubly marginal heritage: black and Narragansett. He was black too, born in Canada to a Barbadian father and a mother of murkily Scottish origin. With few opportunities for painters of color in the antebellum era, he began barbering at her salon.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Four years later, Edward Bannister and Christiana Carteaux were married.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

They moved to Providence in 1870. Madam Bannister, as she was professionally known, continued her profitable venture as a \u201chair doctress.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Financially empowered by his wife\u2019s success, Edward Bannister\u2019s art career took off. He was awarded a First Place prize in the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial, though this triumph foreshadowed later obscurity. Bannister\u2019s winning painting remains lost. Such was an omen for his notability in the next century, though as another millennium approached, a series of successful New York shows renewed public interest.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cMany of his paintings have changed hands since [the 1990s] and some are now more readily accessible,\u201d said Nancy Whipple Grinnell, curator emerita of the Newport Art Museum. \u201d[Bannister] is heavily represented in the Smithsonian Museum of American Art and his paintings sell reliably at auction, unlike other American painters these days.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Grinnell corralled 19 of Bannister\u2019s oil paintings for an exhibit at North Kingstown\u2019s Gilbert Stuart Museum, on view through Oct. 8. The selections come from numerous collections, including the RISD Museum, which loaned the most crucial piece: Bannister\u2019s portrait of Christiana.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\u201cShe was the woman behind the man,\u201d Grinnell said, and acknowledges the portrait as \u201cthe genesis of the exhibition.\u201d Indeed, the show\u2019s adoring title, \u201cMy Greatest Successes Have Come Through Her,\u201d explicitly references Bannister\u2019s appreciation of the couple\u2019s \u201cartistic partnership.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bannister is known for his landscapes, and they comprise the exhibit\u2019s bulk. Many of his paintings were sourced from Rhode Island scenery. Consider the shining horizon in \u201cThe Path Home,\u201d courtesy of Newport\u2019s Paradise Valley. Bannister had found his oasis in the Narragansett Bay: a place to sail, sketch and observe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Grinnell\u2019s words: \u201cHe has a way with clouds, sky and water.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Bannister\u2019s canvases are diverse, alluding to the atmospherics of Impressionism and Tonalism, as well as the Barbizon school\u2019s realism. Grinnell admires his range, something Bannister achieved without the education his white peers enjoyed.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Racism suppressed Bannister\u2019s efforts during and after his life, but his paintings were practically European in flavor. In 1978, scholar Joseph T. Skerrett wrote of the \u201cclearly raceless quality\u201d of Bannister\u2019s landscapes. He further evaluated the artist as \u201ca man without great passions \u2014 at least insofar as his art might express them \u2014 but a man with a poetic sensibility and vigorous and unsentimental interest in nature.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That might describe \u201cThe Old Home,\u201d which eschews the nearly pyrotechnic color of peak Impressionism for a more C\u00e9zanne-like objectivity. It is not exactly dreamy, nor passionless, but there is longing in its distance and perspective, framed by soaring clouds.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The portrait of Christiana Bannister is even more measured, presenting a woman as refined as she is unreachable, sentenced to eternal sitting. The lack of overt emotion invites our unanswerable questions. The portrait\u2019s formality echoes Madam Bannister\u2019s life, which was largely undocumented. What survived are public records, and hair care ads placed in abolitionist newspapers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The records at least evince Christiana\u2019s lifelong activism. One of her later projects was founding the Home for Aged Colored Women in 1890. She moved there herself in 1902, a year after Edward died. It wasn\u2019t a long stay. Eight days\u2019 time saw her declared \u201cviolently insane.\u201d More likely, she was suffering from dementia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Madame Bannister was sent to the state asylum in Cranston. In three months she was dead and, soon after, buried alongside her husband. While Christiana\u2019s grave is unmarked, a monument looms over Edward\u2019s.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Optimists like to assume that history obeys karma, that time and memory correct injustice. That Madame Bannister ended up poor and institutionalized, long footnoted to her husband\u2019s fame, suggests otherwise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Still, we have Bannister\u2019s portrait of his beloved wife, now fittingly on view in her hometown. Grinnell was wise to make it the exhibit\u2019s centerpiece. Portraits are a minority in Bannister\u2019s oeuvre, but the mere existence of this one might evoke what Edward felt for Christiana: warmth, light, composure \u2014 the same steady beauties he unearthed via landscape. Without her, the other paintings may have never manifested. In a room full of soil, sea, and air, Christiana is the terra firma.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

-30-<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Reprinted from Mercury <\/a>(August 2, 2018 edition)
PDF of print edition<\/a> (first page only)
Editor: Janine Weisman<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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They met in 1853. He was eight years her junior, an aspiring painter. She was a businesswoman and abolitionist, a daughter of doubly marginal heritage: black and Narragansett. He was black too, born in Canada to a Barbadian father and a mother of murkily Scottish origin. With few opportunities for painters of color in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"parent":0,"menu_order":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":{"footnotes":""},"class_list":["post-317","page","type-page","status-publish","hentry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/317","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=317"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/317\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1311,"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/317\/revisions\/1311"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ohnocastro.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=317"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}