?Final Price Realized includes Buyer’s Premium added to Hammer Price
Estimate: $ 800 - $ 1,200
(RELIGION.) An unidentified, seated portrait of what is almost certainly the noted minister, author, and editor Benjamin T. Tanner. Quarter plate, large cased tintype, showing the subject reading a newspaper, his Dalmatian dog at his side; some slight rippling to the surface apparent when viewed at an angle. Np, circa 1870's
Benjamin Tucker Tanner (1835-1923) was one of twelve children born to free black parents from Pittsburgh. He attended Avery College, Western Theological Seminary, and Wilberforce where he was made a Doctor of Divinity. In 1862 he took over the 15th Street AME Church in Washington, D.C. and following the war, established the nation's first school for freedmen located in the U. S. Navy Yard in Washington. In 1868 Tanner was elected Secretary of the AME General Conference and named editor of its publication, The Christian Recorder, which soon became the largest black-owned periodical in the nation. In 1884 Turner became the editor of a new AME newspaper, AME Church Review. Four years later he was elected a bishop of the AME Church. Tanner wrote a number of books including "An Apology for African Methodism" (1867) which was highly regarded among contemporary American scholars of religion, and "Outline and Government of the AME Church" (1883). The gentleman shown in the present photograph is shown reading a newspaper, an appropriate view given who Tanner was. An image of Tanner appears in Garland Penn's definitive Afro-American Press and its Editors, page 121.
