Creativity Quote by Henry Ossawa Tanner

Tanner’s line reads like the quiet click before a shutter: modest, observational, and already composing the world into an image. “It seemed to me” downshifts the ego, a rhetorical humility that masks ambition. He’s not announcing a masterpiece; he’s describing a possibility. That restraint is telling for an artist who spent his career navigating institutions eager to categorize him - as an American, as a Black painter, as a “religious” artist - rather than simply seeing him as a maker of complex pictures.

The phrase “great pageant” does double work. It signals spectacle and public ritual, the kind of organized visibility that societies use to tell stories about themselves. A pageant is never neutral; it’s a performance of values, hierarchy, and belonging. Tanner’s interest isn’t the pageant’s official meaning but its pictorial yield: “a chance for a very interesting picture.” That word “chance” matters. He’s alert to the contingent moment when bodies, light, costume, and crowd choreography align into something paint can hold. The subtext is artistic hunger: the world offers him a scene, and he’s already translating it into composition.

Context sharpens the stakes. Tanner, working between the United States and France, often sought spaces where his vision could be received without being reduced. His work is frequently described through subject matter; this quote insists on process. He’s tracking the mechanics of looking: how history and ceremony become raw material, and how an artist can extract human drama from public display without simply illustrating it.