Tanner painting finally to be shown in Philadelphia

The painting was instantly seen in Europe as so profound, so dignified, so good, that the French government, eager to purchase, practically tore it off the walls of the Salon du Champs-Élysées.

That was in 1897.

Henry Ossawa Tanner's The Resurrection of Lazarus immediately entered the collection of the Musée du Luxembourg and then the Musée d'Orsay - a treasure belonging to the French people.

But the painting never appeared in Tanner's homeland, never crossed the Atlantic to the United States, never traveled to Philadelphia, where the artist studied intermittently at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts under the tough gaze of Thomas Eakins.

Until this week.

On Wednesday evening, Lazarus arrived in Philadelphia from Paris in a great green crate. On Friday morning, in a ground-floor gallery of the academy's Hamilton Building, where a Tanner retrospective will open next Saturday and continue through April 15, the crate's sides were unbolted, the foamcore pads were removed, and, for the first time, American light fell directly on an American masterpiece.

Anna O. Marley, the academy's curator of historical American art, clasped her hands in expectation. Gale Rawson, senior registrar, leaned forward.

"It's incredibly exciting for us," Rawson said. "We've looked at images so long as we prepare for the exhibition, when they come out of the crate, it's like Christmas. Anna says it's like seeing an old friend."

Marley, curator of the exhibition, which is the first comprehensive retrospective of Tanner's career in 20 years, likened the moment to "30 Christmases."

The painting, she noted, won a great prize at the 1897 salon, which propelled Tanner to the heights of cultural celebrity.

"This painting, after it won the prize, was spread across the New York Times, it was in the Chicago newspapers, it was written about all over the country," she said. "It was so celebrated."

Even so, Tanner made only a few brief visits back to Philadelphia and America after achieving such fame. He remained an expatriate, living largely in France for the next four decades until his death in 1937.

The reason is only skin deep. Tanner was a sensitive and deeply religious African American who sought refuge in Europe from the racial indignities rampant in his homeland.