The Magazine Antiques

Tanner's first Salon success, Daniel in the Lions' Den, shown in 1896 (now lost but known through a later version at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art),3 departed from conventional compositions that highlight Daniel, eyes heavenward, in a threatening circle of lions. Tanner's Daniel hugs the shadows. His head is down, his back to the wall. The prophet is taking no chances even though the pacing lions have that listless look of the caged beasts in the Jardin des Plantes where Tanner sketched them. The loveliest surprise of the work lies in the artist's dramatic massing of dark and light. A single downward shaft breaks the pervading gloom with warm tonal harmonies.

The Annunciation (Fig. 7), the first of Tanner's works purchased for an American museum, is a marvelous blend of academic realism and abstract invention. No winged angel appears, no benedictory gesture. The God-bearing word travels, as ever, at the speed of light; Tanner's Gabriel is a radiant blade of luminescence. Gone is the lady of medieval imagining, interrupted at her psalter. Here is a dark-haired peasant girl from the hills of Galilee who never held a book. A teenaged Miriam, hands in her lap, looks into the light, weighing the message.

Note that single sturdy bare foot that peeks out from a cascade of drapery. It is a small touch but one that marks Tanner's deliberate distance from centuries of Marian typology. The Virgin might have bared one breast to suckle her baby, but she was rarely depicted barefoot. You might think she never really touched the ground. But traditional images of Mary nursing had a singular purpose: to affirm the humanity of Christ. Tanner, here, emphasizes the humanity of Mary. No need, then, for the exaggerated modesty of a shod foot.

Her exaggerated drapery, however, serves a purpose. A tad lavish for historical accuracy, its undulating spread provides pictorial counter to the geometry of an otherwise spartan interior. In addition, the technical demands of the pendant droop declare Tanner's brotherhood with William-Adolph Bouguereau, Jean-Louis-Ernest Meissonier, Jean-Léon Gérôme, Alexandre Cabanel, Jules Bastien-Lepage, and other prize-winning stars of the Salon.

Mary (Fig. 8), a rediscovered painting, puts Whistler to use again but in a thoroughly unexpected way. Poised on a low bench, Mary's body forms a right angle that dominates the canvas. Her swaddled infant is lying on the floor and so close to her instep that, at quick glance, the tiny figure suggests the footrest Whistler placed at his mother's feet. That slim circlet of light, a shy halo hovering over the baby's head, is almost invisible. A luminous Mary is the painting's single source of light. Hands in her lap and foregoing any attitude of adoration, she sits in perfect equilibrium contemplating her handiwork, as any first-time mother would. At the same time, something disconsolate marks her composure. Her long thick veil—heavy with dense applications of white lead—carries the weight of a winding cloth.

Angels Appearing before the Shepherds (Fig. 6) enlivens a conventional scene by presenting it from the angels' angle of vision. It is a cinematic device that suggests acquaintance with the movies, an industry in full throttle by 1910. (Think of angelic rooftop vigils in Wim Wender's more recent Wings of Desire.) Translucent vice-regents from God's throne look down on distant shepherds huddled with their flock. The nighttime terrain is cool-hued and barren; these mortals could use a glad word. Tanner indicates the shepherds' moment of illumination by warming the ground under them. A hint of green sweetens the melancholy blues and violets of the darkling landscape. Light does not descend, as expected, from bright angelic choristers. Their office fulfilled, Tanner's messengers are dim and spectral. Only the men, and a few forward sheep, brighten with the tidings as if from within.

The character of art is not determined by subject matter; it resides in handling. Tanner orchestrated biblical iconography with the same sense of structure and light—a critical empathy—with which he ordered scenes of France and North Africa. Sodom and Gomorrah (Fig. 1), once owned by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is a stirring testament to Tanner's brushwork, coloristic agility, and feeling for the scale of things before it is a Holy Land anecdote. Compressing detail to a minimum, he shows Lot's wife as a simple white form, brilliant against a brooding, agitated sky of variegated blues scumbled and glazed to perfection.

It is a thrill to see it together with Tanner's plein-air gem Birthplace of Joan of Arc (Fig. 9). Tanner's near contemporaneity with Claude Monet is visible in the delicate tonal range and shifting hues of the earlier painting. Both illustrate the confidence and grace of Tanner's hand and his embrace of Eugène Delacroix's conviction that "the first quality in a picture is to be a delight for the eye." 4

1 Vance Thompson, "American Artists in Paris," Cosmopolitan, vol. 29 (May 1900), pp. 18-19.  2 "Tanner Exhibits Paintings," New York Times, January 29, 1924, p. 12.  3 The version in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art is a large oil on paper mounted on canvas of 1907-1918. Noting that the"first version of this painting...was more realistic, drawing on Tanner's academic training in Philadelphia and Paris," this one is described as "less a literal narrative than an evocation of Daniel's experience" and reflected the artist's "increasingly Symbolist approach" Los Angeles County Museum of Art (Thames and Hudson, London, 2003), p. 172.  4 Eugène Delacroix, Journal, June 22, 1863, quoted in Barbara Novak, American Painting of the Nineteenth Century: Realism, Idealism, and the American Experience (3rd ed., Oxford University Press, New York, 2007), p. 243, n 24. For an overview of Tanner's work, see Dewey F. Mosby,  Henry Ossawa Tanner (Philadelphia Museum of Art, Philadelphia, 1991).

MAUREEN MULLARKEY is a painter who writes on art and culture.

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