It was a remarkable career for any American at the time, particularly for a black American.
Tanner was an unusually gifted technician. His paintings were often in strange mermaid colors of blue and green, the thick impasto suggesting surfaces by 20th-century artists such as Georges Rouault.
Tanner, who lived from 1859 to 1937, was famed for his subjects. He specialized in religious pictures. In 1903, Ladies' Home Journal ran a series of his "Mothers of the Bible." As family friends told it, his choice of subject was influenced by his father, a bishop in the African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Indeed, the scene of a boy's being lovingly instructed in his craft by an older man appears throughout Tanner's works. A contemporary commented that Tanner was a mystic, but a mystic who did his research.
Tanner traveled extensively in the Middle East and in North Africa, and his biblical scenes have the weight of cultural and racial realism. His Jesus, Daniel and Mary are brown-skinned people in gritty desert gear; they inhabit thorny deserts and villages of sun-dried brick.
In the light of the experiences of black Americans, the subjects take on deeper resonance. They echo outside the normal range of criticism.
For example, Tanner did four versions of Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, a subject rare in art history. In the Gospel, a rabbi named Nicodemus comes to converse secretly with Jesus at night. The story could be seen as an archetype of the secret nighttime church meetings of slave and Reconstruction times. Certainly, the ancient stories of enslavement and redemption must have had a special meaning to the artist, whose mother was born into slavery and sent north to freedom by her mother.
