Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Bible Paintings: Humiliated at Home, Honoured in Paris

• Who: Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937), American painter who lived and worked in France from 1891. The Art Institute of Chicago calls him “perhaps the most renowned American painter of religious works at the turn of the 20th century.”
• Born: 21 June 1859 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, free, almost two years before the Civil War began. His father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, was a minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and later a bishop. His mother, Sarah Miller Tanner, had escaped slavery as a child.
• Died: Paris, 25 May 1937, aged 77. He is buried at Sceaux, next to his wife.
• Training: the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under Thomas Eakins, from about 1879–80; the Académie Julian in Paris from 1891, where the teacher he names is Benjamin-Constant.
• Breakthrough: The Resurrection of Lazarus, bought by the French state at the 1897 Salon for the Musée du Luxembourg, France’s museum of living artists. It hangs today in the Musée d’Orsay.
• Family: in 1899 he married Jessie Macauley Olssen, a white American singer, in London. Their only child, Jesse Ossawa Tanner, was born in New York in September 1903.
• Honours: an honourable mention at the 1896 Salon, a third-class medal in 1897 and a second-class medal in 1906, the Pennsylvania Academy’s Lippincott Prize in 1900, the Art Institute of Chicago’s Harris Prize in 1906, the Legion of Honour in 1923, and full membership of the National Academy of Design in 1927.
• How many: there is no catalogue of all his works. Pooling the published lists gives at least 103 religious paintings and studies, and the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1991 catalogue says he painted the Flight into Egypt and the Good Shepherd “more than fifteen times” each.
• Bible text: Berean Standard Bible (BSB).

• A boy in Fairmount Park
• Bound for Rome, stuck in Paris
• The refusal, and the Salon
• Jerusalem, 1897–1899
• Moonlight, lamplight and a stipend
• “Negro Artist” or “Distinguished American”?
• Jessie, Jesse and the Marys
• Nights on the water
• Red Cross gardens and the Flight again
• Blue haze, broken ice
• Last light
• Why the same two stories? · Seven claims, checked · How to pray with a Tanner · FAQ

Tanner was born in Pittsburgh and grew up in Philadelphia, where at twelve or thirteen he walked through Fairmount Park with his father and saw, for the first time, “a real, live artist and at work.” “It was this simple event,” he wrote, “that, as it were, set me on fire.” That night he shortened the skirt of the awning over the kitchen door to make a canvas, and used the back of an old geography book as a palette. His mother found fifteen cents for paint.

Finding a teacher was harder, and in his 1909 memoir he explains why without once using the word race: “No man or boy to whom this country is a land of ‘equal chances’ can realize what heartaches this question caused me.” The question was not whether a teacher would take a poor beginner, but “would he have me, or would he keep me after he found out who I was?” One teacher “had other pupils!”

His father, sensibly, put him into the flour business. After a serious illness the family let him try art, and then backed him, he wrote, “to the limit of their ability” for fifteen years. At the Pennsylvania Academy he studied under Thomas Eakins, whose advice he never forgot: “Get it, get it better, or get it worse. No middle ground of compromise.” He also carried what he called a “repressing load.” He was timid, he wrote, and “to be made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be, even months afterward caused me sometimes weeks of pain.” That is as close as Tanner’s own writing comes to Broad Street.

In 1889 Tanner opened a photography studio in Atlanta, and it failed. At that low point, he wrote, “it was my good fortune to meet Bishop and Mrs. Hartzell,” who for the next few years “became my patron saints.” A show of his pictures was arranged in Cincinnati in the autumn of 1890. “No pictures were sold,” he recalled. “The only part that seemed to have any value were the frames.” So the Hartzells bought the whole lot themselves, and with that money and a $75 commission from a Philadelphian he sailed on 4 January 1891 “for Rome, via Liverpool and Paris.”

He never reached Rome. “After having been in Paris a week,” he wrote, he found conditions “so to my liking that I completely forgot” his plans. At the Académie Julian he refused to take part in the sketch competitions held on Sundays, did the set subject, the Deluge, on a Monday instead with the secretary’s permission, and won one of the two prizes anyway. In his third year he caught typhoid, was treated in a Paris hospital, and went home to Philadelphia to recover. While he was home he painted two scenes of Black family life, by his own choice, and one of them is here.

The Thankful Poor (1894)

The story: Back in Philadelphia in 1894, Tanner painted an old man and a boy bowing their heads over a plain table, the everyday thanks for food that Psalm 145 gives to God.

The eyes of all look to You, and You give them their food in season. You open Your hand and satisfy the desire of every living thing.

Psalm 145:15–16 · BSB

This is not a Bible scene, but it is the hinge between Tanner’s two lives. A statement in his own hand about his Black subjects in general, written in the third person and later kept with this painting, says that many artists who had painted Black life “have only seen the comic, the ludicrous side of it, and have lacked sympathy with and appreciation for the warm big heart that dwells within such a rough exterior.” A Philadelphia reviewer in 1894 called it “an important work, rendered with conscientious care.” The curator Darrel Sewell went further in 1991: “The dignified portrayal of the old man and boy at prayer transcends any other image of black Americans in American art.”

Tanner was thrifty about it. According to Sewell, the canvas had first been started on its other side as a Breton Young Sabot Maker; Tanner turned it over and painted this. A Philadelphia buyer took it in October 1894, and the money helped get him back to Paris. The painting spent most of the next century with the Pennsylvania School for the Deaf, and since 2020 it has belonged to Art Bridges, a lending collection in Arkansas.

The psalm doesn’t say that the eyes of the comfortable look to God. It says “the eyes of all.” Tanner painted two people at a plain table, under the title The Thankful Poor, and gave them the whole of the psalm.

Back in Paris, Tanner “modeled lions in the Jardin des Plantes” for a picture of Daniel, and at the 1896 Salon it earned him an honourable mention, his first official recognition. “True it was but a ‘mention honorable,’” he wrote, “but it was an ‘honor.’” That same year he lost a small income writing art notes for a Philadelphia paper, because the man who paid him “thought I should come to America and paint ‘American subjects.’” His answer was plain: “I refused to come home and paint things I was not drawn to.” That first Daniel is lost. The one we have is a later version with a stowaway.

Daniel in the Lions’ Den (c. 1907–1918)

The story: In the kingdom of Darius the Mede, the Jewish exile Daniel is thrown into a den of lions for praying to his God, and is lifted out unharmed in the morning.

Then Daniel replied, “O king, may you live forever! My God sent His angel and shut the mouths of the lions. They have not hurt me, for I was found innocent in His sight, and I have done no wrong against you, O king.”

Daniel 6:21–22 · BSB

This is Tanner’s third painting of Daniel, a later cousin of the lost 1895 picture that won him his first Salon honour. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art dates it anywhere from 1907 to 1918; the 1991 Philadelphia catalogue prefers about 1914–17. It reads as blue-green from across a room, but LACMA points out that “the lions are sketched in brilliant shades of yellow, green, and lavender.” The curator Dewey Mosby noted “the less-than-fiery attitude of the lions, who pace to and fro, paying little heed to their fellow captive.”

The real surprise was behind it. When conservators restored the painting in 1976, they found another Tanner, Job and His Three Friends, on the same stretcher, with the Daniel canvas stretched over it. A Los Angeles couple had “unknowingly purchased” both pictures in 1918, and the museum had owned the hidden one since 1922 without knowing.

Daniel gives the credit plainly: “My God sent His angel and shut the mouths of the lions.” Tanner paints no angel, only a square of light on the floor in front of Daniel and lions that, as Mosby put it, pay “little heed” to him, which is the miracle itself.

Job and His Three Friends (c. 1904)

The story: In the land of Uz, the ruined and sick Job is visited by his friends Eliphaz, Bildad and Zophar, who sit with him on the ground for seven days without saying a word.

Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights, but no one spoke a word to him because they saw how intense his suffering was.

Job 2:13 · BSB

This is the painting that was hiding behind the Daniel. Mosby wrote that it was “lost from view for nearly seventy years” until the 1976 restoration; after its discovery, the museum sold it through Sotheby’s in 1985. It had been shown in Philadelphia and New York in early 1905, and, in Mosby’s words, “surprisingly this subtle and powerful image did not attract the attention of critics.” Mosby also noted that Job was “not a popular subject with nineteenth-century French painters.” After that showing it vanished, and at some point it ended up behind the Daniel canvas on the same stretcher.

Two small flames burn in the right foreground. Mosby reads them as marking one of the seven nights of silence.

The friends are at their best in this verse. Once they start talking, the book turns into some thirty chapters of argument, and at the end the LORD tells Eliphaz, “you have not spoken about Me accurately, as My servant Job has.” Tanner painted them before they opened their mouths.

The picture that made his name, back in 1896, Tanner painted through a Paris summer, short of money, because that is when models “are willing to make ‘terms.’”

The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896)

The story: At Bethany near Jerusalem, Jesus calls his friend Lazarus, four days dead, out of the tomb in front of Lazarus’s sisters and a crowd of mourners.

After Jesus had said this, He called out in a loud voice, “Lazarus, come out!” The man who had been dead came out with his hands and feet bound in strips of linen, and his face wrapped in a cloth. “Unwrap him and let him go,” Jesus told them.

John 11:43–44 · BSB

Tanner nearly talked himself into a bigger version. A friend told him that a canvas “that gave as much promise ‘as this small-sized one should be much larger,’” and Tanner, admitting that “very likely it flattered my vanity,” bought a canvas six by ten feet. He decided it could only be “a very much ‘watered’ edition of the smaller one” and went back to his “first love,” which measures about 95 by 121 centimetres. Harper’s Weekly approved: “His picture is comparatively small, but its seriousness of attention is very marked.”

His teacher Benjamin-Constant liked it so much that, when Tanner brought it to his studio, “he had it taken to the bedroom of one of his sons to show it.” At the 1897 Salon it won a third-class medal, and the critic Albert Maignon predicted in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts that “we will remember the name of the artist as one of those which, tomorrow, will become famous.” Then the French state asked to buy it, for 1,800 francs. The offer reached Tanner in Venice, and he called it “a great surprise, the greatest of my life. I had not expected to be refused, but a refusal would have been less of a surprise than was this offer to purchase it.” Success had a cost: for years afterwards, he admitted, he lived “in dread that that picture might look to others as it did to me, and thus lose the place it held in the Luxembourg.”

America’s response was to claim him. A syndicated news paragraph called the purchase “the highest honor which has ever been conferred on an American artist abroad.” Booker T. Washington, visiting Paris in 1899, found that when he told Americans they were going to the Luxembourg to see a painting by a Black American, “it was hard to convince them that a Negro had been thus honoured. I do not believe that they were really convinced of the fact until they saw the picture for themselves.”

Tanner puts a bare-armed man at the head end of the body, the figure Mosby calls the one “supporting the head of Lazarus.” In John’s account, Jesus does the impossible part and hands the ordinary part to the people standing around: “Unwrap him and let him go.”

When the finished Lazarus was shown to “a gentleman whose business office was in Paris,” the gentleman decided that “a glimpse of the Holy Land would be beneficial.” So in February 1897 Tanner saw Egypt and Palestine for the first time, “due, be it well understood, to the generosity of this Philadelphia gentleman.” He never names his benefactor; historians identify him as Rodman Wanamaker, of the Philadelphia department-store family. Tanner found Jerusalem “barren, broken-cisterned, sterile,” and Bethlehem, six miles away, “green, refreshing, quiet, still the peaceful shepherds upon the hilltops — blessed.”

A second, longer trip in 1898–99 was timed for the German Kaiser’s state visit to Jerusalem, which Tanner hoped might give him a great pageant to paint. It didn’t. “The police regulations were too severe,” he wrote, and the whole thing was “on the ‘gallop,’ and at no time was it in any way an event of any beauty.” He stayed six months anyway, painting around Jerusalem and the Dead Sea, and in 1899 he married Jessie Olssen in London.

The Annunciation (1898)

The story: In the town of Nazareth, the angel Gabriel greets a young woman named Mary and tells her she will bear the Son of God.

The angel appeared to her and said, “Greetings, you who are highly favored! The Lord is with you.” Mary was greatly troubled at his words and wondered what kind of greeting this might be.

Luke 1:28–29 · BSB

Tanner’s Gabriel is not a winged figure at all but a tall column of golden light at the edge of the room, and Mary, as the critic Helen Cole wrote in 1900, has “no halo or celestial attributes about her, and only the flood of golden light to herald the approach of the angel.” Tanner scrapped his first attempt, which was “so unsatisfactory that there seemed no other way out of the difficulty than to commence a new one.”

The second attempt went into the 1898 Salon, and fellow painters took notice. A letter to Tanner passed on the painter Alexander Harrison’s verdict, “Tanner has made another ten-strike,” and Walter Gay’s claim that “not since Sargent’s early triumphs has there been anything like it.” When it was shown in Philadelphia in January 1899, the Philadelphia Inquirer saw a girl “divided between fear and exaltation.” That April the city’s Wilstach Collection bought it for $1,750, which made it his first work to enter an American museum. It is often said that his future wife Jessie posed for Mary, but the 1991 catalogue thinks he probably hadn’t met her yet and that the model was more likely a professional.

Luke says Mary was “greatly troubled” and wondered what the greeting meant. She asks one practical question, and nine verses later she says yes.

And He Disappeared out of Their Sight (c. 1898)

The story: At a table in Emmaus on the first Easter evening, two disciples finally recognise the risen Jesus as he breaks bread, and in that instant he vanishes.

Then their eyes were opened and they recognized Jesus—and He disappeared from their sight.

Luke 24:31 · BSB

Painting an absence is an odd assignment to give yourself, and Tanner gave it to himself more than once. This small panel, about 27 by 35 centimetres on plywood, is in the Smithsonian American Art Museum, which reads it as the moment Jesus vanishes, “leaving only a shadow to represent his ever-present spirit.” A lost picture of the same subject was shown in Paris in 1899, and a reviewer described its Christ as “a vaporing form, indicating where the Savior was seated.”

Emmaus became one of Tanner’s lifelong subjects. He came back to it again and again, painting the vanishing, the supper, the road and the invitation, and this is the first of three Emmaus pictures in this article.

The disciples don’t stay to stare at the place where he sat. Luke says “they got up that very hour and returned to Jerusalem,” seven miles back with the evening coming on, to tell the others.

Mary (La Sainte-Marie) (1898–1900)

The story: In Bethlehem, after the shepherds have come to see her newborn son, Mary treasures up everything that has happened and ponders it in her heart.

But Mary treasured up all these things and pondered them in her heart.

Luke 2:19 · BSB

Look for the baby and you may not find him. In Mosby’s description, “the newborn child, with a halo hovering above it, is virtually concealed under folds of cloth” in the lower left corner; all you see is a thin ring floating over a heap of cloth. La Salle University, which owns the picture, reads the shroud-like cloth as a foreshadowing of Jesus’ death. The painting still sits in its original frame, which carries its entry number from the 1900 Paris Salon, 1252.

Critics couldn’t agree. When it was shown in Philadelphia in 1901, one called it “an interesting and novel interpretation of a Biblical subject,” and another, in Brush and Pencil, decided “Mary is too severe to be pleasing.” La Salle dates it 1898; the 1991 catalogue reads 1900 on the signature. Mosby also thought Mary’s features “recall those of Tanner’s new bride, Jessie Olssen,” and added, carefully, “if she were indeed the model.”

Luke gives Mary’s inner life just a line in the Christmas story. Tanner’s picture gives that kind of pondering a whole canvas, and keeps the child almost out of sight.

Nicodemus Visiting Jesus (1899)

The story: In Jerusalem, the Pharisee Nicodemus comes to Jesus at night and hears that no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.

He came to Jesus at night and said, “Rabbi, we know that You are a teacher who has come from God. For no one could perform the signs You are doing if God were not with him.” Jesus replied, “Truly, truly, I tell you, no one can see the kingdom of God unless he is born again.”

John 3:2–3 · BSB

Tanner painted this on the spot during his second trip, and signed it “H.O. TANNER / JERUSALEM.” He remembered his model fondly: “I still remember with pleasure the fine head of the old Yemenite Jew who posed for Nicodemus.” He set the night meeting on a rooftop.

The subject was on Tanner’s mind three years earlier. In 1896 his patron Robert Ogden wrote that, of the religious subjects Tanner had lately taken up, “the Nicodemus will stand the best chance of popularity,” though he understood that “at present recognition is more important than a market for your pictures.” The finished picture won the Pennsylvania Academy’s Lippincott Prize in 1900 and was bought for the collection of the same Academy where he had studied under Eakins. Four years later, when Tanner complained that apart from The Annunciation and this picture he had not sold a painting in Philadelphia in eight or ten years, the Academy’s Harrison Morris replied: “Doesn’t it seem a rather large exception to you that your principal picture and one other important one should have been sold to the Academy?” In raking light, a scholar later found that Tanner had scraped out a standing figure beside Christ.

John never says why Nicodemus came at night, but he reminds us that he did. When Jesus is buried, John introduces him again as the man “who had previously come to Jesus at night,” carrying seventy-five pounds of spices.

Flight into Egypt (1899)

The story: Warned in a dream that King Herod means to kill the child, Joseph takes Mary and the infant Jesus out of Bethlehem by night and flees to Egypt.

When Israel was a child, I loved him, and out of Egypt I called My son.

Hosea 11:1 · BSB

This is the first of five Flights into Egypt in this article, and Tanner signed it where he painted it: “H.O. TANNER / Jerusalem 1899.” He remembered a ride one stormy Christmas night to Bethlehem, when it took little imagination “to transpose the scene and see in each hurrying group a ‘Flight into Egypt.’” By 1909 he had “already painted four or five different versions of this subject and the ‘crop’ is not all harvested yet.” It wasn’t. The 1991 catalogue counts more than fifteen.

Reviewing the 1899 Carnegie exhibition in Pittsburgh, where this canvas was probably shown beside his Judas, a critic found the pair “naive, and yet they have a strong sentiment, and a deal of honest fervor which leaves no place in one’s judgement of them for anything but respect.” Mosby saw Tanner’s old teacher in it: the donkeys’ high-stepping gait recalls the carriage horses in Eakins’s Fairman Rogers Four-in-Hand.

Hosea wrote about Israel coming out of Egypt. Matthew heard in those words the story of one child, God’s Son, going down into Egypt to escape Herod, so that God could one day call him out of it.

Salome (c. 1900)

The story: At King Herod’s birthday banquet for the leading men of Galilee, the daughter of Herodias dances for the king and his guests and wins a promise that ends with the head of John the Baptist.

When the daughter of Herodias came and danced, she pleased Herod and his guests, and the king said to the girl, “Ask me for whatever you wish, and I will give it to you.”

Mark 6:22 · BSB

Mark never tells us the girl’s name; “Salome” comes from later tradition. Tanner leaves out nearly everything else as well, Herod and the head included, and paints only a tall veiled figure standing against deep ultramarine. Nudes are, in Mosby’s words, “extremely unusual” in Tanner’s painted work, and as far as Mosby could find, this one was exhibited once in Tanner’s lifetime, in New York in 1924.

The canvas is also a nest of paintings. The back carries an unfinished study for Moses and the Burning Bush, and when conservators took Salome off its stretcher they found a separate painting, Fishermen at Sea, mounted behind it.

The line worth stopping on is the king’s: he “was consumed with sorrow, but because of his oaths and his guests, he did not want to refuse her.”

In the early 1900s Tanner settled into a life in France with Jessie and their son Jesse, born in New York in 1903, dividing the year between Paris and a summer house near the fishing town of Étaples. The American collector Atherton Curtis and his wife Louise became lifelong friends and patrons. Curtis paid Tanner an annual stipend, and his name turns up again and again in the histories of these pictures. In 1909 Tanner would put his creed in print: “Religious pictures must measure up to the requirements of good art or they can never command respect.”

The Savior (c. 1900–1905)

The story: Centuries before Christ, the prophet Isaiah, speaking to Judah and Jerusalem, describes a servant of the Lord who will be “despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows,” words Christians read as a portrait of Jesus.

He was despised and rejected by men, a man of sorrows, acquainted with grief. Like one from whom men hide their faces, He was despised, and we esteemed Him not.

Isaiah 53:3 · BSB

Tanner gives his Christ no halo. There is only a thin yellowish line around the bowed profile, which the Smithsonian calls “a glowing light that suggests Christ’s uniqueness as a spiritual being, able to transcend flesh and blood.” The museum sees him “as a real person in contemplation and prayer rather than as an idealized figure.” The head is carefully modelled, while the hand at lower left is only roughed in.

The historian Alan Braddock places this picture among the “similarly darkened, enigmatic figures of Christ” Tanner painted around 1900, as part of his argument that Tanner questioned the very idea of race.

Isaiah’s verse ends with a confession, not a description: “we esteemed Him not.” The man in this picture is easy to walk past, and the verse puts the blame on the people who walk past him.

The Good Shepherd (c. 1902–1903)

The story: In Jerusalem, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, who knows his sheep and will bring “other sheep” into one flock.

I have other sheep that are not of this fold. I must bring them in as well, and they will listen to My voice. Then there will be one flock and one shepherd.

John 10:16 · BSB

This is the earliest easel version in the 1991 catalogue of a subject Tanner kept painting for about thirty years; in April 1936 he still had a finished Good Shepherd on hand. His son remembered it as one of his father’s favourite subjects. This one hung, for sale, as number 2 in his first big New York show in December 1908, where the New York Times critic admired how “the fine pattern made by the gnarled branches of the trees is extremely decorative.” Mosby traced the great trees back to the oak Tanner had studied in the Holy Land.

It is a night scene, and the flock is, as Mosby put it, only “summarily suggested” as a pale mass behind a single dark figure with no halo.

Jesus says the other sheep “will listen to My voice.” In this painting you can barely see the sheep, and the promise was never that they would see him, only that they would hear him.

Christ and His Disciples on the Road to Bethany (c. 1902–1904)

The story: In the last week before his crucifixion, Jesus leaves Jerusalem at nightfall with his disciples and walks out to the village of Bethany to spend the night.

Then He left them and went out of the city to Bethany, where He spent the night.

Matthew 21:17 · BSB

Tanner was proud of this one. “Very probably one of the most happy ideas is the one in ‘Christ and his Disciples on the Road to Bethany,’” he wrote. “I have taken the tradition that Christ never spent a night in Jerusalem, but at the close of day went to Bethany, returning to the city of strife in the morning.” He put a moon high in a blue sky and, beside the road, the “whited sepulchres”; a pale block with an arched recess at far left seems to be one of them. He also describes a goat herder who bows as Christ passes, though that detail is hard to make out in our reproduction.

The New York Times in 1908 praised its “impression of quiet beauty quite without excess of symbolism or dramatic arrangement.” Tanner gave the picture to Atherton Curtis “in return for an annual stipend,” an arrangement most painters would envy, and it later passed from Curtis to the French state. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay, the same museum as Lazarus.

“Whitewashed tombs” is the charge Jesus would bring in Jerusalem that same week against religious leaders who “appear to be righteous” on the outside and are “full of hypocrisy and wickedness” within. By Tanner’s own account, he walks Christ out of the city past such tombs, on his way to spend the night in Bethany.

Return of the Holy Women (1904)

The story: At the cross outside Jerusalem, Jesus entrusts his mother Mary to the disciple he loved, traditionally identified as John, and from that hour the disciple takes her into his home.

When Jesus saw His mother and the disciple whom He loved standing nearby, He said to His mother, “Woman, here is your son.” Then He said to the disciple, “Here is your mother.” So from that hour, this disciple took her into his home.

John 19:26–27 · BSB

Tanner explained the idea behind it in 1909: “In after years it has often seemed to me that, when bowed by some sorrow, nature seemed more radiant than ever before. This apparent fact influenced largely ‘The Return of the Holy Women.’” His description of the scene includes a rising moon and a shepherd with his flock, neither of which appears in this canvas, so he may have been describing another version. Mosby reads the band across the head of the bearded man, traditionally John, as “Tanner’s own naturalistic shorthand for a halo.”

The painting also had a mishap. According to the 1991 catalogue, it was possibly sold illegally out of a New York art-packing company in 1917, recovered in 1919 by Tanner’s Des Moines agent J. S. Carpenter, and bought by the Cedar Rapids Museum of Art in 1923. A Philadelphia critic in 1907, probably reviewing this canvas, admired “an effect of moonlight admirable in its atmospheric depth.”

The first thing Jesus did from the cross, in John’s account, was to find his mother a home. The first thing the disciple did was to take her there.

Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha (1905)

The story: In a village on Jesus’ travels, Martha hurries to serve him while her sister Mary sits and listens, until Jesus tells the anxious Martha that Mary has chosen the good portion.

“Martha, Martha,” the Lord replied, “you are worried and upset about many things. But only one thing is necessary. Mary has chosen the good portion, and it will not be taken away from her.”

Luke 10:41–42 · BSB

“Very probably the most difficult effect I have ever undertaken,” Tanner wrote, “is that in the picture, ‘Christ at the Home of Mary and Martha,’ now in the Carnegie Galleries.” Mosby explains the difficulty as light: a lamp with several flames, a small flame on the back wall and a white tablecloth, all in a dark room. The Carnegie in Pittsburgh, the city where he was born, bought it in 1907 for $500 plus an exchange of his earlier Judas Covenanting with the High Priests, so Pittsburgh paid partly in cash and partly in Judas. Mosby reported traces of a painted-out figure behind the table, not visible in our reproduction, and wondered whether Tanner had been slipping Judas into this scene too, though that is his speculation.

Jesus doesn’t tell Martha off for serving; he tells her she is “worried and upset about many things,” and invites her to the one thing that isn’t on her list.

Christ at the Home of Mary (c. 1905)

The story: In a village on Jesus’ travels, Mary sits in her sister Martha’s home listening to Jesus as he teaches.

She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet listening to His message.

Luke 10:39 · BSB

Somebody is missing. In this small pastel, about 29 by 24 centimetres, Tanner keeps only Mary and Jesus at a lamp-lit table, while his Carnegie oil of the same story has Martha on her feet, serving. The Norton Museum of Art in West Palm Beach acquired it in 2022 and built an exhibition around it, Henry Ossawa Tanner: Intimate Pictures, arguing that “the small size of these works highlights his exceptional ability to convey the intimate relationship of human beings to each other, their world, and the divine.”

Luke says Mary sat at his feet; Tanner seats her at the table across from him. Either way, she has stopped doing everything else.

Abraham’s Oak (1905)

The story: At Hebron in Canaan, Abram pitches his tent beside the great trees of Mamre and builds an altar to the LORD.

So Abram moved his tent and went to live near the Oaks of Mamre at Hebron, where he built an altar to the LORD.

Genesis 13:18 · BSB

Here is a Bible painting without a Bible scene in it: the huge twisting tree that pilgrims near Hebron called Abraham’s Oak, a full moon, and two small figures walking in the right foreground. A picture with this title hung as number 27 in Tanner’s 1908 New York show, lent by Atherton Curtis, and it was probably this one. Mosby thought a tree in Christ and His Disciples on the Road to Bethany was close to this one.

Tanner certainly had the cast for a proper Abraham. He never forgot “two Persian Jews whom I once saw at Rachel’s Tomb; what a magnificent ‘Abraham’ either one of them would have made.” He painted the tree instead.

The Bible speaks of the “Oaks of Mamre,” in the plural, and remembers them for what happened under them: a tent, an altar and, a few chapters later, the LORD appearing to Abraham “in the heat of the day.” Tanner leaves Abraham and his visitors out, and lets you supply them.

In 1906 France bought Tanner’s The Disciples at Emmaus, its second painting by him, and Philadelphia’s North American ran the story under the headline “The American Negro Who Leads France in Art.” That October the Art Institute of Chicago gave him its Harris Prize for a different painting, The Two Disciples at the Tomb, and bought that work, and the Washington Post put the news on its front page as “Award For Negro Artist.” Two years later a New York gallery gave him his first big solo show and billed it “Religious Paintings by the Distinguished American Artist Mr. Henry O. Tanner.” In April 1909 the National Academy of Design elected him an associate member, in the same batch as Mary Cassatt, and that summer, when The World’s Work printed his memoir, the magazine ran his portrait with the caption “An American whose religious pictures have won him fame.” Depending on which paper you read, he was a Negro artist, an American artist, or both in the same sentence.

The Disciples at Emmaus (1905–1906)

The story: At a table in Emmaus on the first Easter evening, the risen Jesus blesses and breaks bread for two disciples who still have not recognised him.

While He was reclining at the table with them, He took bread, spoke a blessing and broke it, and gave it to them.

Luke 24:30 · BSB

This is the Emmaus picture France bought, from the 1906 Salon, for 4,000 francs, more than twice what it had paid for Lazarus. It won a second-class medal, which made Tanner hors concours, free to exhibit at the Salon without facing its jury again; Mosby adds that first-class medals were then reserved for French citizens. By 1908 an American magazine could report that “Tanner has had the honor to which every artist who comes to Paris aspires — two of his paintings are in the Luxembourg.”

Tanner said the idea grew out of another picture: “the picture in the Chicago Institute prompted the ‘Christ and Disciples at Emmaus.’” Mosby even recognised the same young model in both pictures. Christ, at the left, has no halo.

Luke’s two disciples had walked some seven miles beside Jesus without knowing him, because “their eyes were kept from recognizing Him.” Tanner gives him no halo to help. Luke says they knew him “in the breaking of the bread,” when their eyes were opened.

The Two Disciples at the Tomb (c. 1906)

The story: On Easter morning in Jerusalem, Peter and the disciple Jesus loved run to the tomb after Mary Magdalene tells them the Lord has been taken, and find it empty.

Then Peter and the other disciple set out for the tomb. The two were running together, but the other disciple outran Peter and reached the tomb first.

John 20:3–4 · BSB

The Art Institute of Chicago’s annual exhibition of American art in 1906 had plenty of competition, and, according to a writer who covered it, “the jury of award was unanimous in selecting Mr. Tanner’s picture as the best.” It won the $500 Harris Prize, the museum bought it straight from Tanner, and the Washington Post put the news on page one. The same writer, Florence Bentley, summed up the picture: “That is all—an opening from which a stone has been rolled away from which light streams and two poor Jews gazing into the miraculous light.”

The painter and historian James A. Porter later described it in the language of the movies, as depending “like a cinematographic ‘close-up,’ on the power of the human face to convey pathos,” and called it “the apogee of Tanner’s religious paintings.” Tanner put almost nothing in it except two men and a doorway of light; the Art Institute identifies them as Peter and John.

John is honest about that morning. The other disciple “saw and believed,” but the next verse admits that “they still did not understand from the Scripture that Jesus had to rise from the dead.” Belief came first; understanding caught up later.

The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water (c. 1907)

The story: On the Sea of Galilee in the small hours, the disciples see Jesus walking toward their boat, take him for a ghost, and hear him tell them not to be afraid.

When the disciples saw Him walking on the sea, they were terrified. “It’s a ghost!” they said, and cried out in fear. But Jesus spoke up at once: “Take courage! It is I. Do not be afraid.”

Matthew 14:26–27 · BSB

As a teenager, Tanner had “decided to become America’s great marine painter.” In the end many of his sea pictures were Bible pictures. In this one, Jesus is only a pale, featureless glow standing on the water at upper left, which Mosby calls “the phantomlike vertical shape.” There is no horizon at all, and the moon isn’t in the picture either, only its reflection on the water at lower left. “Perhaps one of Tanner’s most original ideas,” Mosby wrote, “was to place the reflection of the moon in the water, at the lower left, making it the actual source of light.”

It was marked for sale in his 1908 New York show, and it was bought from him for Des Moines in 1921, probably through his Midwestern agent J. S. Carpenter; it is now in the Des Moines Art Center.

Tanner painted Jesus the way the disciples first saw him, a pale shape they took for a ghost. Matthew adds what the paint can’t: Jesus “spoke up at once.”

The Flight into Egypt (c. 1907–1912)

The story: After the Magi leave Bethlehem, an angel warns Joseph in a dream to take Mary and the child and flee to Egypt, because King Herod is about to search for him.

When the Magi had gone, an angel of the Lord appeared to Joseph in a dream. “Get up!” he said. “Take the Child and His mother and flee to Egypt. Stay there until I tell you, for Herod is going to search for the Child to kill Him.”

Matthew 2:13 · BSB

In Tanner’s earliest known Flight, the man Mosby calls Joseph is on foot. In this one, the second of five in this article, both travellers ride, and they are dwarfed by a huge tree under a luminous blue sky. The painting has no published exhibition history that we found, and the Cincinnati Art Museum bought it in 2002. That closes a circle of sorts: Cincinnati is where Tanner’s show of 1890 failed to sell a single picture, until his patrons bought the lot and sent him to Europe.

The angel’s instructions come with no end date: “Stay there until I tell you.” Joseph goes.

Christ and His Disciples Before the Last Supper (1908–1909)

The story: On the evening of the Passover in Jerusalem, Jesus arrives with the Twelve for the meal that becomes the Last Supper, though the 1991 Tanner catalogue argues that the painting really shows a Canaanite mother begging him to heal her daughter.

When evening came, Jesus arrived with the Twelve.

Mark 14:17 · BSB

Nobody quite agrees on what is happening in this painting. The owner, Spelman College in Atlanta, which bought it in 1967, calls it Christ and His Disciples Before the Last Supper. Mosby proposed “a more appropriate title, Christ with the Canaanite Woman and Her Daughter,” after the mother in Matthew 15 whose persistence Jesus praised as great faith. The raised hands make an appeal visible without settling who makes it. Our Mark 14 pairing follows the owner’s title; it is not evidence that Mosby’s alternative has been resolved.

Mosby read the setting as a North African street, painted after Tanner’s trip to Algiers early in 1908, and pointed out the long blue shadows cast by trees that never appear in the picture.

If the title is right, Mark’s wording carries the weight: Jesus arrived “with the Twelve,” and that evening the Twelve still included Judas.

The Three Marys (1910)

The story: At dawn after the Sabbath, Mary Magdalene and the other women walk to Jesus’ tomb outside Jerusalem wondering who will roll away the stone, and find it already moved.

They were asking one another, “Who will roll away the stone from the entrance of the tomb?” But when they looked up, they saw that the stone had been rolled away, even though it was extremely large.

Mark 16:3–4 · BSB

Reviewing the 1910 Salon, the French critic Clément-Janin complained that its religious painters, Tanner among them, lacked faith, and then praised the colour harmonies of this picture. The son of an AME bishop, who refused to compete on Sundays, took his lack of faith home with a compliment. The Art Institute of Chicago owned the painting from 1913 and gave it to Fisk University in Nashville in 1950. Sewell admired the leading woman’s gown, “rendered by Tanner in a distinctive technique of isolated, feathery strokes.” Our reproduction crops the canvas, and the stone can’t be made out in it.

The women set out at dawn with a problem they couldn’t solve, a stone too heavy for them, and went anyway. By the time they arrived, it had been solved.

Tanner told the Chicago critic F. J. Campbell in 1911 that “one of his aims was to present the simple domestic side of biblical personages,” and that “the Bible was full of suggested domesticity.” At least once, the domesticity was his own: for one painting he dressed his wife Jessie and their young son Jesse in Middle Eastern costume and photographed them as models, and the photographs survive in the Smithsonian’s Archives of American Art. His first solo show in Chicago opened on 1 February 1911, and the poet Harriet Monroe, a year away from founding Poetry magazine, reviewed it for the Chicago Daily Tribune, with firm opinions about which of his Marys were holy enough.

Christ and His Mother Studying the Scriptures (c. 1909–1910)

The story: Back home in Nazareth after his visit to the Temple at twelve, the boy Jesus grows up under Mary’s care “in wisdom and stature.”

And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature, and in favor with God and man.

Luke 2:52 · BSB

This is the painting with the family models: Mary is Jessie Tanner and the boy is their son Jesse, whom Tanner photographed in costume, as Mosby documented. When the Dallas Museum of Art studied it in 2021, X-rays revealed an abandoned composition underneath, painted sideways: two draped figures in a landscape, according to NPR’s report on the project.

Monroe was not won over. The painting appears to have been shown in Chicago in 1911 under the title Christ Learning to Read, and she judged it, along with Mary Visiting Elizabeth, “far less religious in their suggestion than some of the landscapes.” A near-replica in Des Moines now carries that earlier title.

The Gospel isn’t embarrassed to say that Jesus learned. Luke says plainly that he “grew in wisdom,” and Tanner paints the ordinary way that happens, a mother and a son bent over the same scroll.

The Holy Family (c. 1909–1910)

The story: In Egypt, where Joseph has taken Mary and the infant Jesus to hide them from King Herod, the family waits until an angel tells Joseph in a dream that it is safe to go home.

After Herod died, an angel of the Lord appeared in a dream to Joseph in Egypt. “Get up!” he said. “Take the Child and His mother and go to the land of Israel, for those seeking the Child’s life are now dead.”

Matthew 2:19–20 · BSB

Monroe loved this one. In the same review that found Christ Learning to Read insufficiently religious, she decided The Holy Family was “infused with this quality of spiritual mystery and poetry,” and admired “the soft richness and depth of its shadowy greenish tone crossed by a streak of yellow light.” On 10 February 1911, nine days after the show opened, it was bought for Muskegon, Michigan, through the Hackley Picture Fund; it is now in the Muskegon Museum of Art.

Campbell noticed that “one has to search a little to discover the babe’s face appearing from the folds of a rug on the floor,” and saw “some forms about the floor hinting at shavings.” The 1991 catalogue reads the room as Joseph’s carpenter’s shop, “probably located in Egypt.” If so, Joseph is keeping his trade going in exile while he waits for the next word from God.

The Visitation (early 20th century)

The story: Newly pregnant with Jesus, Mary hurries from Nazareth to a town in the hill country of Judah to greet her relative Elizabeth, who is expecting John the Baptist.

In those days Mary got ready and hurried to a town in the hill country of Judah, where she entered the home of Zechariah and greeted Elizabeth.

Luke 1:39–40 · BSB

Tanner sets the Visitation around a table with a bowl of oranges. One woman stands in a lit doorway with a hand extended; the other, in blue, raises both hands. He doesn’t label them. The Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, which owns the picture, reads the woman in the doorway as the visitor, which by Luke’s account would make her Mary.

This is probably the Mary Visiting Elizabeth that Monroe saw in Chicago in 1911, and the one she lumped together with Christ Learning to Read as “far less religious in their suggestion than some of the landscapes.” That is two Tanners dismissed in one sentence.

Luke says that at Mary’s greeting “the baby leaped in her womb”: one unborn child responding to another, before Elizabeth has said a word.

Mary (c. 1908–1910)

The story: After presenting the baby Jesus at the Temple, Mary and Joseph go home to Nazareth, where the child grows strong and full of wisdom.

When Jesus’ parents had done everything required by the Law of the Lord, they returned to Galilee, to their own town of Nazareth. And the Child grew and became strong. He was filled with wisdom, and the grace of God was upon Him.

Luke 2:39–40 · BSB

The only sign that the young woman in this bare room is anyone special is a faint ring floating above the bed at the far left; as in his other Marys, Tanner uses a halo where you might expect the child, and in our reproduction no child can be seen. The Weatherspoon Art Museum in Greensboro, North Carolina, owns it. It may be the Mary of about 1909–10 that the 1991 catalogue recorded in a Florida collection, but that hasn’t been confirmed.

Luke covers Jesus’ childhood in Nazareth in a handful of verses. Tanner’s picture feels like one ordinary hour of that kind, the “simple domestic side” he said he was after.

Mary (c. 1910)

The story: The prophet Isaiah, speaking to Judah and Jerusalem, foretells a child to be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace, words Christians read as the birth of Mary’s son.

For unto us a child is born, unto us a son is given, and the government will be upon His shoulders. And He will be called Wonderful Counselor, Mighty God, Everlasting Father, Prince of Peace.

Isaiah 9:6 · BSB

Little is known about this one; it once passed through Michael Rosenfeld Gallery in New York, no museum record has turned up, and even its date, about 1910, comes only from a published list. At lower left, beside Mary, is a pale swaddled shape under a thin floating ring of gold, the same halo device Tanner used in his Marys of 1900 and about 1922.

Isaiah’s titles are enormous, and Tanner’s haloed bundle is easy to miss; the Christmas story holds both at once.

Angels Appearing before the Shepherds (c. 1910)

The story: On the night Jesus is born in Bethlehem, an angel appears to shepherds in the nearby fields, and a great multitude of the heavenly host joins in praising God.

And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying: “Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favor rests!”

Luke 2:13–14 · BSB

Most painters give the shepherds one angel. Tanner gives them a crowd: tall, see-through figures that tower over three tiny people by a small fire. “Unlike most renditions of the scene, there is a phalanx of angels rather than one,” Mosby wrote, “because Tanner had seized upon Luke’s phrase, ‘a multitude of the heavenly host.’” He added that the transparent angels “give the picture such a mysterious atmosphere and make it so unusual within his oeuvre.”

Tanner kept this one. It stayed in his studio until his death, and he doesn’t seem to have exhibited it. For years it was catalogued as Angels Appearing before the Wise Men, which is awkward, because in Matthew the Wise Men get a dream, not a choir. The historian Lynda Roscoe Hartigan gave it back to the shepherds.

Luke’s first announcement of the birth went to shepherds “keeping watch over their flocks by night,” and after one angel had given the news, a multitude joined in praising God.

Mary (c. 1914)

The story: In the town of Nazareth, God sends the angel Gabriel to a young woman named Mary, engaged to Joseph, a man of the house of David.

In the sixth month, God sent the angel Gabriel to a town in Galilee called Nazareth, to a virgin pledged in marriage to a man named Joseph, who was of the house of David. And the virgin’s name was Mary.

Luke 1:26–27 · BSB

Sixteen years after The Annunciation, Tanner again seats Mary on the edge of a bed in a bare, dark room. This time there is no column of light. The only light is a small oil lamp she holds in her own hands. The Smithsonian reads it as Mary waiting for the angel, with the lamp standing for God’s presence, though no angel is painted.

The Smithsonian dates it to about 1914. That August his mother died, and the outbreak of war emptied the family’s village near Étaples and sent them to England. Nothing ties the painting to either event.

Luke introduces her with a town, a fiancé and his family line, and only then her name, as the last words of the verse. In the Smithsonian’s reading, Tanner paints her just before any of it begins.

The family’s summer home was at Trépied, near the fishing port of Étaples on the Channel coast, and Tanner, who had once wanted to be a marine painter, kept coming back to boats at night. Three more of his Sea of Galilee pictures show how differently he could tell the same stretch of water.

The Disciples on the Sea (c. 1910)

The story: One evening the disciples set out by boat across the Sea of Galilee toward Capernaum, rowing in the dark before Jesus comes to them across the water.

When evening came, His disciples went down to the sea, got into a boat, and started across the sea to Capernaum. It was already dark, and Jesus had not yet gone out to them.

John 6:16–17 · BSB

According to the 1991 catalogue, a figure of Jesus on the water was once in this picture and “has been painted out.” What’s left is the boat, its sail and the moon. Sewell compared it with the small Richmond board below: “The two paintings display the same predominantly blue color scheme with a touch of orange indicating glancing sunlight.” It came to the Toledo Museum of Art in 1913 as a gift of Frank W. Gunsaulus.

John has a phrase for this picture: “Jesus had not yet gone out to them.” In the picture as it stands, Jesus isn’t there, and the disciples are left in the “not yet.”

Christ and His Disciples on the Sea of Galilee (c. 1910)

The story: One evening beside the Sea of Galilee, Jesus tells his disciples, “Let us cross to the other side,” and sets out with them on the crossing where a storm will break over them.

When that evening came, He said to His disciples, “Let us cross to the other side.” After they had dismissed the crowd, they took Jesus with them, since He was already in the boat. And there were other boats with Him.

Mark 4:35–36 · BSB

This board is only 10 by 14 inches, and in three years it went through three titles at three exhibitions: The Disciples See Christ Walking on Water in Pittsburgh in 1910, Disciples on the Sea of Galilee in Chicago in 1911 and Disciples on the Sea in Chicago in 1913. The Virginia Museum of Fine Arts and Sewell read it as the crossing that ends in the calming of the storm. Sewell called it “a complete work of art in itself, not a study for a larger picture,” and singled out “the pale, rather insubstantial but expressive figure of Christ” at the right end of the boat. It belongs to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond. Sewell also thought Tanner “must have been familiar with” Delacroix’s paintings of the same storm.

Mark’s small detail is worth a second look: “they took Jesus with them, since He was already in the boat.” Before the storm starts, he is already on board.

The Miraculous Haul of Fishes (c. 1913–1914)

The story: On the Lake of Gennesaret after a fruitless night, Simon Peter lets down his nets at Jesus’ word and catches so many fish that the nets begin to tear.

When they had done so, they caught such a large number of fish that their nets began to tear.

Luke 5:6 · BSB

“Tanner concentrated on the moment in which the apostles pull in the heavy net,” Mosby wrote, “so full of fish that the boat tilts to the sea.” He read it as the catch after the Resurrection in John 21, where Jesus is on the shore. We pair it here with Luke 5, an earlier fishing miracle. The difference matters: Luke’s nets begin to tear, while John explicitly says the net remains unbroken (John 21:11). The title alone cannot identify which account Tanner intended. Mosby counted nine men in the boat, against seven disciples in John, and suggested Tanner chose the number for the composition.

The painting shared a mishap with Return of the Holy Women: the 1991 catalogue says it too was possibly sold illegally from a New York art-packing firm in 1917 and was recovered or bought back after 1919. In 1927 the National Academy of Design finally made Tanner a full Academician, “which though late is better than never,” he wrote, and he gave the Academy this canvas as his reception piece.

Peter’s first response to the miracle, in Luke, is fear of being so close to holiness: “Go away from me, Lord,” he says, “for I am a sinful man.” Jesus’ answer begins with “Do not be afraid,” and ends with a new job: “From now on you will catch men.”

The First World War hit Tanner hard. His mother died in August 1914, the family had to leave its home near Étaples, and the war weighed on him; his friend Atherton Curtis urged him to think “of the beautiful things done in the past by you and start again for the future.” When the United States entered the war in 1917, Tanner was almost fifty-eight and too old to enlist, so he found his own way to help. Staying at Vittel, where there was a field hospital, he noticed the unused land around it and proposed that convalescing soldiers grow vegetables on it. The proposal went through Walter Hines Page, then the American ambassador in London and formerly the editor of The World’s Work, and the American Red Cross adopted it. Tanner served as a Red Cross lieutenant and then as assistant director of its Farm and Garden Services until June 1919. According to the 1991 catalogue, the Red Cross’s own histories of the war don’t mention him.

Flight into Egypt (c. 1916)

The story: Fleeing King Herod’s threat against the infant Jesus, Joseph leads Mary and the child out of Bethlehem by night toward Egypt.

The LORD will guard you from all evil; He will preserve your soul. The LORD will watch over your coming and going, both now and forevermore.

Psalm 121:7–8 · BSB

This is the third of the five Flights here, and the most moonlit, painted on a wooden panel with a thick, crusty surface. It belonged to the Barnett-Aden Collection in Washington, and according to the Smithsonian’s announcement, the BET founder Robert L. Johnson gave it to the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in 2015.

Psalm 121 is a pilgrim’s song for the road, and its last promise covers leaving as well as arriving: “your coming and going.” For this family, going came first.

Fisherman’s Devotions, Étaples (c. 1916)

The story: In the fishing port of Étaples on France’s Channel coast, near Tanner’s summer home, local people gather at the foot of a tall roadside crucifix.

Then they cried out to the LORD in their trouble, and He brought them out of their distress. He calmed the storm to a whisper, and the waves of the sea were hushed.

Psalm 107:28–29 · BSB

This isn’t a Bible scene. Tanner painted the faith of his own neighbours at Étaples: a roadside crucifix, with the hull of a boat at lower right. The panel is only about 33 by 23 centimetres. Tanner gave it to a Danish collection around 1916, and it stayed in Denmark until 2010. It was chosen for the 2012 Tanner retrospective, Modern Spirit.

Psalm 107 has a stanza for people who “went out to sea in ships.” It doesn’t pretend the storms won’t come; it says that when they cried out, the LORD “brought them out of their distress,” and the sea went quiet.

The Good Shepherd (c. 1918)

The story: In Jerusalem, Jesus calls himself the good shepherd, who knows his sheep by name and lays down his life for them.

I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.

John 10:11 · BSB

This Good Shepherd stands at the door of a long, low building with a heavy roof, his flock crowded along its front, painted in thick, cracked paint on canvas laid down on particle board. The National Gallery of Art dates it about 1918, the year Tanner was running Red Cross vegetable gardens. It once belonged to the Washington collector Thurlow Evans Tibbs Jr., went to the Corcoran Gallery in 1996, and came to the National Gallery in 2014.

A few verses earlier Jesus says the shepherd “calls his own sheep by name and leads them out.” Tanner paints him standing at the door.

Flight into Egypt (1921)

The story: Warned by an angel, Joseph takes Mary and the infant Jesus out of Bethlehem and into Egypt to escape King Herod.

But those who wait upon the LORD will renew their strength; they will mount up with wings like eagles; they will run and not grow weary, they will walk and not faint.

Isaiah 40:31 · BSB

The 1991 catalogue suggests that this fourth Flight was shown at Tanner’s one-man exhibition in Boston in January 1921. Compare it with the Detroit picture of 1899: here both travellers ride, and the beasts carry the journey’s slow weight. The escape has become an image of slow endurance: danger demands that they keep moving, but movement itself takes effort.

Isaiah’s promise ends in an unexpected order: first wings, then running, then walking. For the very tired, the last line may be the one that reaches furthest: “they will walk and not faint.”

Departure into Egypt (At the Inn) (undated)

The story: Roused by an angel’s warning, Joseph gets up in the night and takes Mary and the infant Jesus out of Bethlehem to begin the flight into Egypt.

So he got up, took the Child and His mother by night, and withdrew to Egypt, where he stayed until the death of Herod. This fulfilled what the Lord had spoken through the prophet: “Out of Egypt I called My Son.”

Matthew 2:14–15 · BSB

The last of our five Flights doesn’t take place on the road at all. Tanner paints the moment of leaving: a saddled donkey waiting in the dark and a tall man in a long dark coat by the door. The Smithsonian suggests he is “probably the guard who will lead them out of the city,” not Joseph. A lantern-carrying guard leads the Holy Family in another Tanner Flight too, the 1923 version now at the Metropolitan Museum, which was once titled The Futile Guard. The Smithsonian leaves it undated.

The inn belongs to Tanner’s staging of the departure. Matthew’s account mentions a house when the Magi visit (2:11), then gives no lodging details for the escape itself. Tanner fills that silence with the practical business of leaving: people, animals, a doorway to get through. Matthew’s flight begins with Joseph getting up; Tanner makes us consider what getting everyone safely away might involve.

Moses in the Bullrushes (1921)

The story: When Pharaoh orders every Hebrew baby boy thrown into the Nile, a Levite mother in Egypt hides her son in a papyrus basket among the reeds, where Pharaoh’s daughter finds him and names him Moses.

But when she could no longer hide him, she got him a papyrus basket and coated it with tar and pitch. Then she placed the child in the basket and set it among the reeds along the bank of the Nile.

Exodus 2:3 · BSB

Tanner sets it at night on a wide, silvery Nile. The Smithsonian reads the moonlight on the water as a possible sign of God’s presence. Moses kept coming back in Tanner’s work: the mother of Moses was one of the five Mothers of the Bible he listed in 1909, the back of his Salome carries a study for Moses and the Burning Bush, and in 1935 he offered a young relative in Chicago a Hiding of Moses or a Flight into Egypt for $200, about half his usual price, “because I should like some of my family to have some of my work.”

Pharaoh had told his people to throw the Hebrew boys into the Nile. This mother does put her son in the Nile, sealed in a basket with tar and pitch, and the river becomes the way he is saved.

Tanner’s father, Bishop Tanner, died in January 1923. A few months later France made Henry a knight of the Legion of Honour, which, according to the 1991 catalogue, he considered the greatest honour of his career. In January 1924 he showed nineteen pictures at the Grand Central Art Galleries in New York, and the New York Times managed to print both sides of the argument about him. One review complained that “the many religious titles are religious only in the title and are not human,” and that the artist “veils his picture with a blue haze too difficult to penetrate.” Another article that month quoted Tanner himself: “My effort has been not only to put the Biblical incident in the original setting, but at the same time to give the human touch which makes the whole world kin and which ever remains the same.” In September 1925 Jessie died. Their son, Jesse, came home to look after his father.

The Good Shepherd (The Lost Sheep) (1922)

The story: On his way to Jerusalem, answering Pharisees who complain that he welcomes sinners, Jesus tells of a shepherd who leaves ninety-nine sheep to find the one that is lost and carries it home on his shoulders, rejoicing.

And when he finds it, he joyfully puts it on his shoulders, comes home, and calls together his friends and neighbors to tell them, ‘Rejoice with me, for I have found my lost sheep!’

Luke 15:5–6 · BSB

Of the nineteen pictures in the 1924 show, a New York Times critic singled this one out: “It gives a vivid picture of desolation, with the rugged hills in the background, and all about the struggling vegetation, barren and hopeless.” The shepherd carries the sheep across his shoulders, a detail found in Luke’s version of the parable but not in Matthew’s, and the classic image of the Good Shepherd. It is signed and dated 1922, and the Newark Museum of Art has owned it since 1929.

Tanner knew about single sheep from experience. As a student he kept one as a model, and concluded in 1909 that “one sheep has none of the qualities of a flock of sheep, no, not one, except, it may be, their stupidity. One sheep is not ‘sheepish’; no, he is the most stubborn, balky, run-away, befuddled animal you can imagine.”

His description would fit the lost sheep of the parable well enough. Luke’s shepherd doesn’t lecture it on the way home; he “joyfully puts it on his shoulders” and calls the neighbours to celebrate.

Virgin and Child (c. 1922)

The story: Writing to the churches of Galatia, the apostle Paul sums up the Christmas story in a sentence: when the time had fully come, God sent his Son, born of a woman.

But when the time had fully come, God sent His Son, born of a woman, born under the law, to redeem those under the law, that we might receive our adoption as sons.

Galatians 4:4–5 · BSB

Over the bed beside Mary a thin pale-green ring floats in the air. Mosby read it as the halo of the Christ Child hidden in the bedclothes, though no child can be made out in our reproduction. He saw a change in Tanner’s Marys, too: “In the present picture, painted after the tragedies of World War I, the artist portrayed a mature woman whose demeanor manifests a profound understanding of the message of the annunciatory angel.” He added that “the model for Mary could very well have been Tanner’s wife, Jessie Olssen.” It was sold in 1927 through Grand Central and Tanner’s Des Moines agent J. S. Carpenter, and it now belongs to the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford.

Paul’s summary is short: “born of a woman.” The Son of God was born the way every child is born, and a real woman, not a symbol, was his mother.

Sodom and Gomorrah (c. 1920–1924)

The story: At daybreak in Sodom, on the plain of the Jordan, angels hurry Abraham’s nephew Lot and his family out of the city with the order not to look back, before the LORD rains fire and sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah.

As soon as the men had brought them out, one of them said, “Run for your lives! Do not look back, and do not stop anywhere on the plain! Flee to the mountains, or you will be swept away!”

Genesis 19:17 · BSB

Cloud or smoke fills three quarters of the canvas. At lower left, three small cloaked figures walk along a pale path, and to their right, apart, stands a small white upright form. It is tempting to call it Lot’s wife, but no source does.

The painting has had a busy life. Tanner’s patron Atherton Curtis gave a Tanner Sodom and Gomorrah to the Metropolitan Museum in 1924. The dealer who showed this canvas in 2019 says it belonged to the Met and was sold off in the 1950s, which would make it very probably Curtis’s gift; in 2023 it went to the Amon Carter Museum of American Art in Fort Worth. A 1926 notice quoted in W. E. B. Du Bois’s column in The Crisis guessed where the smoke came from: “Probably his inspiration came at the sight of some such terrific scene during the war. Nothing in natural events, indeed, could be imagined to typify more fittingly the wrath of God in the biblical story than the aspect of the sky after a great explosion.”

The angel’s order has four parts: run, don’t look back, don’t stop, head for the mountains. Getting out of Sodom was only the start: Lot bargained over the mountains, and his wife looked back.

The Sleeping Disciples (c. 1923)

The story: In the garden of Gethsemane on the Mount of Olives, on the night before his crucifixion, Jesus comes back from praying and finds his disciples asleep.

When Jesus rose from prayer and returned to the disciples, He found them asleep, exhausted from sorrow.

Luke 22:45 · BSB

Du Bois once heard Tanner say, “Do you know, I never have been able to sell one of my pictures to a colored man.” Then, at the 1924 New York show, the Black New Yorker John E. Nail bought two, and Du Bois reported it in The Crisis: “But the ice is broken.” According to the 1991 catalogue, the two were this picture and a Flight into Egypt. The Depression forced Nail to sell, and Tanner wrote in 1933 that he was “so very sorry to hear that Nail was the only man of ‘our group’ who ever bought one of my pictures to be forced to sell.” That year the painting passed to Tanner’s niece, Sadie T. M. Alexander.

Tanner turns the usual Gethsemane around. Two sleeping disciples and a lit lantern fill the foreground, and far back at upper left is only a faint pale figure, whom Mosby identifies as Jesus at prayer. Mosby calls Gethsemane “a traditional biblical image rarely painted by Tanner.”

Mark and Matthew say the disciples’ eyes were heavy. Only Luke adds that they were “exhausted from sorrow,” which is about the kindest possible description of a failure.

Study for Christ and Nicodemus on a Rooftop (c. 1923)

The story: In Jerusalem, the Pharisee Nicodemus, a leader of the Jews, asks Jesus how a grown man can possibly be born again.

“How can a man be born when he is old?” Nicodemus asked. “Can he enter his mother’s womb a second time to be born?”

John 3:4 · BSB

Twenty-four years after his prize-winning Nicodemus, Tanner was asked to paint the subject again. In 1923 the Cheyney Training School for Teachers in Pennsylvania commissioned a new Nicodemus for $3,000, and Mosby noted a small Smithsonian sketch that “might be” a study for it. This oil sketch, about 24 by 33 centimetres, is dated about 1923, and it seats Nicodemus low on a mat, where in 1899 he sat facing a Jesus perched on the parapet. In 1927 Tanner wrote, “I have sent the picture ordered by Cheyney and hope it will be liked.”

Nicodemus’s question sounds naive, but it is an honest one, and Jesus doesn’t mock it. He answers it at once, with water and the Spirit, and the same conversation arrives, twelve verses later, at what may be the best-known verse in the Bible.

The Three Wise Men (1925)

The story: Magi from the east follow a star from Jerusalem to Bethlehem to find the newborn King of the Jews.

After they had heard the king, they went on their way, and the star they had seen in the east went ahead of them until it stood over the place where the Child was.

Matthew 2:9 · BSB

Tanner leaves out the star, the crowns and the gifts, and paints a line of hooded riders and camels in a blue-green night, with one small bright rectangle of light in the distance at right. Darrel Sewell called it “the simplification of color and form to the barest essentials,” evidence of Tanner’s “preoccupation with the evocative power of biblical stories rather than their literal illustration.” An earlier, more detailed Wise Men with a hillside town is lost. His Des Moines agent wrote in May 1925, “I feel very sure I can place the ‘Wise men’ in the near future,” very likely meaning this picture, and in 1927 a local collector, M. H. Cohen, bought it.

The Magi came “from the east” with a star and not much else. In Matthew the Magi arrive in Jerusalem having seen a star; it takes the prophet Micah, quoted by the chief priests and scribes Herod calls together, to name Bethlehem, and then the star goes ahead of them the rest of the way.

Invitation to Christ to Enter by His Disciples at Emmaus (undated, probably 1920s)

The story: On the first Easter evening near the village of Emmaus outside Jerusalem, two disciples urge the stranger who has walked with them, the risen Jesus, to stay the night.

But they pleaded with Him, “Stay with us, for it is nearly evening and the day is almost over.” So He went in to stay with them.

Luke 24:29 · BSB

This is the third Emmaus picture here, after the vanishing and the supper, and it stays outdoors at nightfall: a figure in a white robe on a stony path, and a bearded disciple leaning toward him with an arm held out and the palm open. The painting surfaced from an English private collection and sold at Christie’s in New York in 2018.

They invite him in before they know who he is. In Luke’s telling, the hospitality comes first and the recognition comes at the table.

In 1927 the National Academy of Design made Tanner a full Academician, “which though late is better than never.” He spent years experimenting with paint, and in 1930 he wrote that after “5 or 6 years” he had “finally a wonderful binder.” Around then, the Smithsonian notes, he and his son had both been ill. In 1933 he wrote from Paris that “no one knows what may come or what Hitler may decide to do, as no one dares to oppose him in Germany,” and at the end of 1936 he told his niece, “Also I am getting older but I believe and friends believe my work is still up to its average — and I hope beyond.”

Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah (c. 1929–1930)

The story: When the LORD rains fire and sulfur on Sodom and Gomorrah, Abraham’s nephew Lot has just reached the little town of Zoar with his daughters.

Then the LORD rained down sulfur and fire on Sodom and Gomorrah—from the LORD out of the heavens. Thus He destroyed these cities and the entire plain, including all the inhabitants of the cities and everything that grew on the ground.

Genesis 19:24–25 · BSB

This is the other Sodom, painted several years later and turned on its side. The people almost vanish: the High Museum of Art in Atlanta notes that “Tanner downplays the presence of Lot and his daughters, barely visible at the lower right.” What’s left is smoke and ground; Mosby described “the predominantly brown diagonals of the terrain, which flows like lava from an erupting volcano.” It is painted in tempera and varnish on cardboard, part of that long experiment with binders, and Tanner’s own notes on how to apply the paint are written on the back, now illegible. The Atlanta collector J. J. Haverty bought it from him in 1929, and it came to the High with Haverty’s collection in 1949.

Genesis describes a whole plain destroyed, and Tanner paints it as landscape. The rescue is in the corner, where, the museum says, Lot and his daughters are barely visible, and Genesis says why they are there at all: God “remembered Abraham, and He brought Lot out of the catastrophe.”

He Healed the Sick (c. 1930)

The story: As Jesus travels through Galilee preaching the kingdom, crowds bring him the sick, the suffering and the paralysed, and he heals them.

News about Him spread all over Syria, and people brought to Him all who were ill with various diseases, those suffering acute pain, the demon-possessed, those having seizures, and the paralyzed, and He healed them.

Matthew 4:24 · BSB

Around 1930 Tanner painted a crowd bringing the sick under a massive tree at least three times. This small panel in the Smithsonian is, in the museum’s words, “probably a study for another work by Henry Ossawa Tanner titled Disciples Healing the Sick, which is more finished and detailed.” No single figure can be identified as Christ, and the paint is thick, layered and scraped, far from his smooth pictures of the 1890s. Sewell suggested, with a “perhaps,” that the subject was personal: Tanner and his son had both recently recovered from illness.

Matthew’s list of sufferers is long and specific, and it ends with four words that cover all of them: “and He healed them.”

He Healed the Sick #11 (c. 1930)

The story: At sunset in Capernaum, the townspeople bring Jesus everyone who is ill, and laying his hands on each one, he heals them.

At sunset, all who were ill with various diseases were brought to Jesus, and laying His hands on each one, He healed them.

Luke 4:40 · BSB

Another small picture of a healing crowd under a great tree, even smaller, at 23.5 by 33 centimetres on board. It came up at Sotheby’s in New York in 2019 as He Healed the Sick #11; nobody has explained the number. The conservator who wrote Sotheby’s condition report found that “this work on board is in very good state. It does not seem to have ever been restored,” so the thick, built-up paint is as Tanner left it.

Luke adds a detail Matthew leaves out: Jesus laid his hands “on each one.” The crowd is healed one person at a time.

Disciples Healing the Sick (c. 1930)

The story: After Pentecost in Jerusalem, people carry their sick into the streets on cots and mats so that the apostles can heal them.

As a result, people brought the sick into the streets and laid them on cots and mats, so that at least Peter’s shadow might fall on some of them as he passed by. Crowds also gathered from the towns around Jerusalem, bringing the sick and those tormented by unclean spirits, and all of them were healed.

Acts 5:15–16 · BSB

This is the big one, and the Smithsonian thinks its small panel is probably a study for it: oil on cardboard, about 91 by 122 centimetres, with a figure lying on a stretcher under the same arching tree. It never appeared in an exhibition in Tanner’s lifetime and stayed in his studio until his son sold it in 1967; the 1991 catalogue located it at Clark Atlanta University. Sewell called it “the most distinctive and consequential of Tanner’s late career,” and admitted that “none seems to fit the event depicted” among the healings in Acts.

In Acts the Council sees that Peter and John are “unschooled, ordinary men,” and yet people laid out their sick hoping for Peter’s shadow. Tanner, in his seventies, painted Christ’s work continuing through his followers.

The Good Shepherd (Atlas Mountains, Morocco) (c. 1930)

The story: Among the exiles in Babylon, the prophet Ezekiel announces that God himself will search for his sheep and rescue them from every place they were scattered “on a day of clouds and darkness.”

As a shepherd looks for his scattered sheep when he is among the flock, so I will look for My flock. I will rescue them from all the places to which they were scattered on a day of clouds and darkness.

Ezekiel 34:12 · BSB

Find the shepherd. He is a tiny white-hooded figure at lower right, with pale sheep spreading up the slope behind him, dwarfed by a vast gorge of grey-white cliffs. The Smithsonian says that Tanner, who had travelled to Morocco in 1912, “downplayed the story in favor of the impressive landscape itself.” The museum dates it about 1930; Mosby put it in Tanner’s last years, because the back of the panel carries the Paris address he moved to in 1934. The museum’s label also quotes his son on what his father believed: “God needs us to help fight with him against evil and we need God to guide us.”

In Ezekiel, the searching isn’t left to Israel’s failed shepherds. God does it himself: “I will look for My flock.”

Return from the Cross (c. 1934–1935)

The story: At Golgotha outside Jerusalem, Jesus entrusts his mother to the disciple he loved, traditionally John, and the women who had followed him from Galilee go home to prepare spices before the Sabbath.

Then they returned to prepare spices and perfumes. And they rested on the Sabbath, according to the commandment.

Luke 23:56 · BSB

Tanner kept returning to the return. According to Bonhams there is a smaller version of about 1930; this tall board dates from around 1934–35, and the Howard picture below from 1936, so he painted the subject at least twice, perhaps three times, and the idea goes back to his Return of the Holy Women of 1904. Here Mary and John fill the board. It passed from Tanner to a cousin-in-law and stayed with that family for decades; in 2021 it sold at Bonhams for about $238,000 and went to the Lunder Collection at the Colby College Museum of Art in Maine. It was probably the Return from the Cross Tanner sent to the Corcoran Biennial in Washington in 1935, when he was seventy-five.

Luke’s women go home on the day of the crucifixion and prepare spices, and then they rest, because it is the Sabbath. Grief doesn’t cancel the commandment. On Sunday morning they will need those spices, or so they think.

Return from the Crucifixion (1936)

The story: After Jesus dies at Golgotha, the crowd goes home beating their breasts, while those who knew him, including the women from Galilee, stand at a distance watching.

And when all the people who had gathered for this spectacle saw what had happened, they returned home beating their breasts. But all those who knew Jesus, including the women who had followed Him from Galilee, stood at a distance watching these things.

Luke 23:48–49 · BSB

This is, in Mosby’s words, “Tanner’s last signed and dated work.” He drew Mary’s head for it in 1933 and was still working on it in 1936. A group of cloaked mourners walks down an ochre slope, led by a figure in a dark mantle whom Mosby identifies as Mary, and far off on the skyline stand three thin uprights, which Mosby reads as the three empty crosses. Howard University in Washington, on whose board Tanner’s father had served, bought it by public subscription in March 1937.

Two months later, on 25 May 1937, Tanner died in his sleep in Paris. “I still work each day,” he had written that May, “but not so many hours as formerly.” Two weeks before his death he said to Atherton and Ingeborg Curtis, “How beautiful spring time is in Paris! The earth is awakening once more.” He was buried at Sceaux, next to Jessie.

Luke ends the crucifixion with people standing “at a distance watching.” He doesn’t leave them there. The next chapter opens very early on Sunday morning.

The 1991 catalogue says Tanner painted the Flight into Egypt and the Good Shepherd “more than fifteen times” each; we hold five of one and four of the other. He never explained either, though he left a clue for the first. On a stormy Christmas-night ride to Bethlehem, he wrote, it took little imagination to “see in each hurrying group a ‘Flight into Egypt,’” and in 1909 he said “the ‘crop’ is not all harvested yet.” As late as April 1936, according to Mosby, he told his New York dealers he had a finished Flight and a finished Good Shepherd on hand.

The rest is other people’s reading, and worth hearing as that. Mosby suggested that a Bible story of flight from persecution “might have been linked in Tanner’s mind with the plight of contemporary blacks, especially those who migrated from southern states to the North.” He tied the Good Shepherd to the importance of Psalm 23 in the African Methodist Episcopal church Tanner grew up in, and read John’s “one flock and one shepherd” as a statement about racial equality, though Tanner never said so. His son simply remembered that “‘The Good Shepherd’ was a favorite subject of his.” And Darrel Sewell, comparing the 1899 Flight with one finished by 1935, found that “the basic conception of the scene is remarkably similar”: over thirty-five years, Tanner kept the story and changed the paint.

“He was born after the Civil War.” No. He was born on 21 June 1859, almost two years before the war began, and born free in a free state. The link to slavery runs through his mother, who had escaped it as a child.

“White classmates tied him to his easel and threw him into the street.” Partly true, and the true version is stranger. The only account is Joseph Pennell’s memoir of 1925, written some forty-five years after the event. Pennell says the student’s easel “was carried out into the middle of Broad Street” and that he “was firmly tied to it and left there.” Nobody was thrown. Pennell doesn’t name the student; historians identify him as Tanner. Tanner himself never mentioned it.

“America wouldn’t let a Black artist paint the Bible.” No. The man who paid him to write art notes for a Philadelphia paper wanted him to come home and paint “American subjects,” and Tanner refused. American museums then bought his Bible paintings quickly: Philadelphia in 1899, the Pennsylvania Academy in 1900 and the Art Institute of Chicago in 1906. His paintings of Black family life, The Banjo Lesson and The Thankful Poor, were his own idea, painted on a visit home.

“He fled to Paris on a one-way ticket.” No. His patrons paid, and he sailed “for Rome, via Liverpool and Paris.” He liked Paris and stayed. He also went back to America more than once, first to recover from typhoid.

“He said, ‘In America I am a Black man; in France I am an artist.’” We could find no source for this. He reportedly told a magazine writer that in Paris he was simply “M. Tanner, an American artist,” but the original article hasn’t been traced. What he did write, in a private letter of 1914 answering a friend who had written of him as a Negro, was, as the historian Will South reads the manuscript, a question: “Now am I a Negro?”

“Lazarus won a gold medal and went to the Louvre.” No on both counts. One 1897 New York paper did say “gold medal,” but the 1991 catalogue records a third-class medal, and Tanner’s own memoir mentions none. The state bought the picture for the Musée du Luxembourg, the national museum of living artists. It is now in the Musée d’Orsay.

“His father wanted him to be a preacher, not a painter.” Not in Tanner’s own telling. His father first put him into the flour business, doubting “any special talent for art” in the boy, and then the family supported him, Tanner wrote, “to the limit of their ability” for fifteen years.

Visio Divina (Latin for “divine seeing”) is a way of praying with an image, modelled on the old practice of lectio divina. Try it with The Annunciation (1898).

1. Look. Spend a minute with the picture before you think about it. Notice where the light is, and where Mary is, and how much empty room there is between them.
2. Meditate. Read Luke 1:38 slowly: “I am the Lord’s servant,” Mary answered. “May it happen to me according to your word.” In the moment Tanner paints, she may not have said it yet. Where are you, before the yes or after it?
3. Pray. Tell God plainly what feels too large for your ordinary room right now, and ask for the courage Mary found.
4. Contemplate. Sit quietly with the thought that God chose to come into an ordinary room with a rumpled bed, and that yours is not too ordinary for him either.

Who was Henry Ossawa Tanner?

Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859–1937) was an American painter, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal bishop, who trained under Thomas Eakins in Philadelphia and spent most of his career in France. He is best known for Bible scenes such as The Resurrection of Lazarus and The Annunciation, and the Norton Museum of Art, among others, calls him the first African American artist to gain international acclaim.

What is Henry Ossawa Tanner’s most famous painting?

Outside his Bible pictures, The Banjo Lesson (1893), at Hampton University, is the one most people know. Among his Bible paintings, the most celebrated are The Annunciation (1898) in the Philadelphia Museum of Art and The Resurrection of Lazarus (1896) in the Musée d’Orsay, the picture France bought in 1897.

Why did Henry Ossawa Tanner move to France?

He went to Europe in 1891 to study, bound for Rome, and stayed in Paris because he liked it. He never wrote that he left America because of racism, though museums today often read his decision to settle in France that way. What he did write is that in Philadelphia he had been “made to feel that I was not wanted, although in a place where I had every right to be.”

Was Henry Ossawa Tanner religious?

Yes. His father was an AME minister and bishop, he refused to take part in art-school competitions held on Sundays, and he wrote that “it was the good God who opened the way and gave me good friends.” He also insisted that faith was no excuse for weak painting: “Religious pictures must measure up to the requirements of good art or they can never command respect.”

Where can I see Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Bible paintings?

The Philadelphia Museum of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Des Moines Art Center and the Detroit Institute of Arts all own his religious paintings. Many are not always on view, so check before you travel.

How many religious paintings did Tanner make?

Nobody knows exactly, because no complete catalogue of his work exists. The published lists add up to at least 103 religious paintings and studies, and he painted some subjects, like the Flight into Egypt and the Good Shepherd, “more than fifteen times” each, according to the Philadelphia Museum of Art’s 1991 catalogue.

All 53 paintings in this article are playable as web puzzles in our Open Gallery. Here are eight places to begin:

• The Annunciation
• Angels Appearing before the Shepherds
• The Holy Family
• Flight into Egypt (1921)
• The Disciples See Christ Walking on the Water
• The Three Marys
• Return of the Holy Women
• Disciples Healing the Sick