Seeing Henry Ossawa Tanner’s paintings at the Musée du Luxembourg, Paris, Booker T. Washington wrote,

Few people ever stopped . . . when looking at his pictures, to inquire whether Mr. Tanner was a Negro painter, a French painter, a German painter. They simply knew that he was able to produce . . . a great painting—and the matter of his color did not enter into their minds.

Raised in Philadelphia by parents who were activists for African American advancement, Tanner studied at the Pennsylvania Academy under Thomas Eakins, and the two remained lifelong friends. In 1891, to escape racial prejudice, Tanner settled permanently in Paris and soon acquired an international reputation. He returned to the United States briefly in 1893, staying as a guest at the home of the Tanner family friend and abolitionist minister, educator, and social reformer George Washington Gray. Shortly thereafter, Tanner created this vision of Gray’s Ohio boyhood.