Mary (La Sainte-Marie)

About the artwork

The infant is nearly hidden under the cloth at the lower left; the thin halo is easier to find than his face. La Salle University, which owns the picture, reads the covering’s resemblance to a shroud as an anticipation of Christ’s death. The child’s concealment makes Mary’s grave, absorbed presence unusually prominent in a scene of mother and baby.

That severity divided early viewers. When the painting was exhibited in America in 1901, Francis J. Ziegler welcomed its novel treatment, while Melville E. Wright found Mary too severe to please him. Their disagreement points to what Tanner asks us to look at: a mother whose attention cannot be reduced to a reassuring smile. Her stillness leaves room for the weight of what she is pondering.

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

What does Luke 2:19 mean?

The shepherds come to Bethlehem after the angelic announcement and tell what they have heard about the child. Those around them marvel. Luke 2:19 then distinguishes Mary’s response: she keeps these events and words together, pondering them in her heart.

This verse offers a way into Tanner’s concentrated figure, although scholars have proposed different biblical settings for the painting. Luke supplies no description of Mary’s expression and does not say that she is contemplating Jesus’ death here. The shroud association belongs to the museum’s interpretation. Held beside the verse, the painting gives time and space to a response that the birth narrative expresses in a single sentence.

Luke 2:19 gives context to the painting’s inward mood, while the nearly concealed child slows the viewer’s own act of attention.

Sources

La Salle University Art Museum, Philadelphia (84-P-298); oil on canvas, 86.7 × 108.3 cm. Collection identity and the interpretation of the cloth as a shroud. The museum dates the work 1898; the 1991 catalogue reads 1900 on the signature. Its original frame retains the 1900 Salon number.

Henry Ossawa Tanner’s Bible Paintings: Humiliated at Home, Honoured in Paris. Artwork reading adapted from this guide.

Luke 2 — Berean Standard Bible. Context for Luke 2:19.

Philadelphia Museum of Art — Henry Ossawa Tanner, 1991 catalogue, entry 50. Mosby’s entry on Mary records the hidden infant, competing interpretations of the setting, the 1900 inscription, and the contrasting 1901 responses of Ziegler and Wright.