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Edward Mitchell Bannister (1828-1901) was a Canadian-born African American landscape and portrait painter in Boston, Massachusetts and Providence, Rhode Island. He was among Providence's leading painters during the 1870s and 1880s and was one of the few African American painters of the nineteenth century to win significant recognition.
Bannister moved to Boston in 1848 where he enrolled in evening classes at the Lowell Institute and learned to paint. He settled in Rhode Island with his wife in 1870 and in 1876 won the first-prize bronze medal at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition. Subsequently his growing reputation resulted in many commissions which allowed him to devote himself full-time to painting.
Bannister was an original board member of the Rhode Island School of Design and a respected art critic. Following his death in 1901 the Providence Art Club, of which he was a founding member, held a memorial exhibition of his paintings owned by Providence collectors.
