Henry Ossawa Tanner, Annunciation, 1898, Philadelphia Museum of Art.


Henry O. Tanner was, with Robert Duncanson, one of the most accomplished and professionally successful artists of African American heritage after the Civil War and before World War I. From Pittsburgh originally, he studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts with Thomas Eakins, and later, as still a young man, moved to Paris to study and later to work. Like the younger Beaufort Delaney, he worked for much of his career in Paris.

This painting was an astonishment to me when I first saw it. It was the first modern re-envisioning of the Annuncation, when the angel Gabriel came to Mary to announce the conception of Jesus, I'd seen. Tanner's almost dead-pan "realism" butts up against the contemporary styles of Post-Impressionism (mainly because it comes after "Impressionism"), the "realism" of his American mentor, Thomas Eakins, elements of the art nouveau of his contemporaries in Paris. He also exploits some of the incipient super-realism--"surrealism"--of other contemporaries, Elihu Vedder among others.