Sodom and Gomorrah

About the artwork

Three cloaked figures move along a pale path beneath an immense blue-green sky. The cloud seems to occupy almost the whole world, while the path is only a narrow strip beneath it. Tanner makes departure difficult to find in a scene dominated by catastrophe. Once noticed, the small figures change the landscape from a spectacle into a place someone must escape.

The soft, mottled colour gives the threatening sky an unexpected beauty. It holds the eye above the figures even as their route carries them away. A separate pale shape stands near the group, but the available collection record does not identify it securely as Lot’s wife. The clearest contrast is between the enormous disturbance overhead and the fragile movement along the ground.

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

What does Genesis 19:17 mean?

At dawn, the messengers urge Lot, his wife, and their two daughters to leave Sodom. Lot hesitates, and they lead the family out by the hand. Genesis 19:17 is the urgent instruction that follows: escape, do not linger on the plain, and do not look back.

The instruction follows an act of mercy: the messengers take the hesitant family by the hand and bring them outside. Flight begins with help, not with Lot’s confidence. Tanner’s small group gives that vulnerable escape a visible scale; Genesis later recounts Lot’s wife looking back, but it does not establish the identity of every form in this painted landscape.

Genesis 19:17 gives the small figures’ departure its urgency; the preceding rescue explains how a hesitant family comes to be on the road at all.

Sources

Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth (2023.11); oil on canvas, 106 × 92.7 cm. Exact Carter canvas, c. 1920–1924. No identification of the separate pale form or evidence of artist intention concerning wartime explosions is supplied by this record.

Genesis 19 — Berean Standard Bible. Context for Genesis 19:17.