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The Annunciation
(painting, 1898)
No matter what the artistic medium, it is always a challenge to portray a moment when the supernatural breaks into our world and make such a moment believable rather than kitschy or sentimental. Throughout art history, the annunciation—that instant when the angel appeared to the Virgin Mary to tell her that she would be the mother of the Messiah—has been a popular theme in religious painting. Many of these paintings are beautiful, but also tend to be stiff and reverential rather than alive and convincing. Others are cloyingly sweet, flowing over with schmaltzy religiosity, and are not very believable in human terms. But Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation manages to be both lovely and emotionally resonant and at the same time feel utterly convincing.
Mary is portrayed as a young Jewish peasant sitting on the edge of her bed amid crumpled bedclothes, wearing a striped costume that would have been common for a young woman of the poorer class. She has no halo, nor is there anything immediately recognizable as special about her. She is not, as is often the case, surrounded by symbols of her purity. Nor is there anything grandiose about the simple setting. The angel who has appeared to her is not the conventional celestial-winged messenger of religious art, but rather a burst of overpowering golden light that permeates the room with its warm glow. Mary seems a bit frightened, as any ordinary person might be if she had just been addressed by an angelic being.
By the sheer ordinariness of this depiction of the intersection between the divine and human, we are reminded that God communicates to perfectly ordinary human beings in perfectly ordinary circumstances. And the holiness that infuses the picture is less in the flood of golden light and more in the look on Mary’s face, captured in the moment when fear is beginning to give way to contemplation and then acceptance. Her hands are folded in her lap, her head tilted upward, and her eyes focused. There is receptivity in her body language, an openness to God’s will.
The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia [Wikimedia Commons, CC-PD-Mark]
Because the angel is presented in such an abstract form, all the focus of the painting is upon Mary. She is a reflection of the light, and it is through her posture and attitude that we experience the calm, the peace, and the holiness that fills the room. She is our clue to how we are to read this moment of revelation. As in many of Tanner’s paintings, it is through his focus on the figure who is receiving the light of revelation that we begin to understand something supernatural is taking place before our eyes.
Henry Ossawa Tanner was born in 1859 in Pittsburgh, on the eve of the Civil War, to a father who was a free black and who later became a minister, then a bishop, in the African Methodist Episcopal Church. His mother had been a slave but was rescued by the Underground Railroad. His father always stressed the importance of an intelligent faith and also instilled a deep sense of dignity in his children in the face of widespread racial prejudice. Tanner would never forget the time that his mother was ejected from a streetcar in a snowstorm when the driver noticed she was black. His father, Benjamin Tanner, was frequently subject to beatings and verbal abuse because he had the temerity to expect to be treated with the same rights as any other American citizen. Benjamin was heavily involved not only in the AME church but also in work for civil rights and the abolition of slavery.
When the young Tanner first saw an artist at work in a park, he knew that he had found the vocation for his life, and he was supported in this by his parents, even though at the time it was highly unusual for a black person to make a career out of art, much less to study it in the academy. But Tanner did just that, studying under Thomas Eakins and other luminaries of American art at the prestigious Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, where he was the only black student. His very earliest work is largely landscape and shows the influence of the Hudson River School of painters, who saw the divine in nature.
As Tanner’s own style emerged, he created works like The Banjo Lesson (1893) and The Thankful Poor (1894), through which he provided a window into the life of African Americans. These paintings subvert racial stereotypes and treat their subjects with dignity and affection. Some critics and supporters wished he would create more works in this vein, but he did not want to be thought of as a “negro artist.” Tanner believed, instead, that his true artistic calling was found in painting works that reflected his deep Christian faith:
I have no doubt an inheritance of religious feeling, and for this I am glad, but I have also a decided and I hope an intelligent religious faith not due to inheritance but to my own convictions. I believe my religion. I have chosen the character of my art because it conveys my message and tells what I want to tell my own generation and leave to the future.1
To pursue this calling, Tanner found it necessary to leave the United States, where racial discrimination was so deeply imbedded, and study in France, where he found the acceptance as an artist and as a man that he had not found in the States. In France he did not have to struggle against the kind of prejudice that believed it impossible for a black man to be a great painter. Tanner wanted to be an artist who happened to be an African American, not to be pigeonholed as an African-American artist. It was only after being embraced by the French as an internationally significant painter that he finally gained full recognition in his home country. But except for a handful of visits to the United States, he would make France his home for the rest of his life.
Rather than becoming a peddler of sacred anecdotes captured in paint, Tanner wanted his paintings to touch something deeper inside those who viewed them. He wanted them to be a place of intersection, where communication could happen between humanity and God. To do this, Tanner specialized in painting biblical scenes reflective of his deep knowledge and love of the Scriptures. He prayed daily, read the Bible regularly, and even made two visits to the Holy Land in order to drink up the atmosphere and help get the details right when he portrayed biblical events. But it wasn’t enough for him to strive for a realism that rooted the biblical incidents in their original settings; he also wanted to convince the viewer that the same supernatural presence one could sense in his paintings was available to every human being.
Throughout his work, Tanner used light as the symbol for the arrival of something divine, which infused the scene with meaning; a reflection of God’s welcoming presence. He used light not for its dramatic effect but for illumination—in both the physical and spiritual senses of the word. For example, in one of his great early masterpieces, Daniel and the Lion’s Den (1896), we see Daniel in the shadows, among the lions that pace around him but do not harm him. There is a shaft of light falling upon him that signals to the viewer that God has intervened on Daniel’s behalf. Daniel was a figure with whom Tanner, often the target of misunderstanding and racism, could identify, and a man whose lonely faith and courage in the face of persecution he wished to emulate. And like Daniel, he tried to stay pure and true to his values, even when consorting with other Parisian artists who did not share his convictions against drinking alcohol and carousing.
We also see his creative use of light in his painting of Nicodemus meeting Jesus by night. There is a subtle light illuminating Jesus’s eyes, though the rest of his face is in shadow, but we cannot see the eyes of Nicodemus at all; perhaps Tanner is making reference to Nicodemus’s spiritual blindness, which can only be overcome by the words of Jesus, the One whose eyes penetrate the darkness. Nicodemus is clearly the learner, and Jesus is the master teacher.
Tanner developed a style that was singularly his own—a sort of visual mysticism. His expressive brushwork, unusual lighting, and unexpected use of colors reflected the introspection of the figures in his paintings. He hoped thereby to engage the viewers in personal introspection and invite them to an encounter with the living God. Perhaps it is his son, Jesse Tanner, who has best summarized the desired impact of his father’s art:
A Tanner can do more than give you enjoyment, it can come to your rescue, it can reaffirm your confidence in man and his destiny, it can help you surmount your difficulties or console you in your distress. A picture by Tanner is really part of the artist himself, a mystic whose visions are deeply personal yet universal in significance.2