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remembered, too, as one of the founding members of the Providence Art Club, the fertilizing body of the Rhode Island School of Design.
Henry Tanner (1859-1937), who studied with Thomas Eakins but turned a deaf ear to his master?s eloquent appeal ? to peer deeper into the heart of American life, ? adopted Paris as his home for the last forty-six years of his life. There, sustained by praise and American supporters, he indulged his romantic orientalism by interpreting Biblical scenes with commanding skill. Having ? risen above ? communal and national loyalties, and attracted idealists by doing so, he is remembered today only through the perpetuating will of the people he rejected.
Tanner brought the journeyman stage of American Negro art, in Alain Locke?s phrase, to its peak. A new period, sometimes called the ? Negro Renaissance, ? began with the ? New Negro Movement ? which took shape during the cultural ferments of the 1920?s. It gave American Negroes a new view of life: a proud, protesting, compassionate, intensely American view which contained historv and people with transforming understanding.
Its poets, benefiting from the American revolution in poetry between Walt Whitman and Carl Sandburg, knew (perhaps intuitively rather than analytically) that it is a major function of poetry to incite
?	not by shouting but by creating and recreating myths (? poet ? means ? myth-maker ?) through distillations of heritage and loving intimacy with ? life stepping on their feet. ?
Langston Hughes, more than any other, was its poet. Indeed, one of his earliest poems, ? The Negro Speaks of Rivers, ? first printed by W. E. B. Du Bois in The Crisis for June, 1921, and included in The Weary Blues (Knopf, 1926), ushered in and set the tone of the Movement. Millennia stir behind it:
I've known rivers:
I've known rivers ancient as the world and older than the How of human blood in human veins My soul has grown deep like the rivers.
I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young,
1 built mv hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep,
I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.
1 heard the singing ol the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln went down to New Orleans, and I've seen its muddy bosom turn all goklen in the sunset.
I've known rivers:
Ancient, dusky rivers.
Mv soul has grown deep like the rivers.
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