Judith Wilson’s “Lifting the Veil” is centered around two Henry Ossawa Tanner’s art works: The Banjo Lesson, 1893, and The Thankful Poor, 1894. Wilson claims that both genre scenes were strategically done by Turner to contradict the stereotype that African Americans have an “innate black musicality and superstitious emotionalism of black religion.” Tanner studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts along with Thomas Eakins. Eakins was one few white artists of his time who was able to portray African Americans in a realistic manner. With Tanner’s education in Pennsylvania along with his experiences abroad, Wilson proclaims that he was “the first U.S. black fully equipped to succeed as a painter.” In The Banjo Lesson, Tanner displaces stereotypes in several different ways. The most obvious is the fact that he shows both the older man and child in an environment devoid of trash and filth. The floors are covered in wood planks instead of the notion of blacks living in homes with dirt floors. He shows the pair as having slender means, but not in complete scarcity, as there is a table setting complete with pitcher and a loaf of bread. Tanner dislodges the stereotype of the innate black musicality, by showing how the elder is instructing the young child in playing the instrument. Wilson declares that Tanner’s The Banjo Lesson, marked a turning point in African American art history. In both art works, Tanner was able to let viewers have an inside look into the lives of African Americans that most Caucasians had only been able to speculate about.