Daniel in the Lions' Den

The Salon picture of 1896

Henry Ossawa Tanner wrote in 1909 that he painted Daniel in the Lions' Den in 1895, modelling lions at the Jardin des Plantes and working in the summer class of the animal sculptor Emmanuel Frémiet. He showed Frémiet a sketch, and was told that everything depended on how he developed it: done well it would be a good picture, "and, if not, why, it will be a very ordinary one."

The painting was shown at the Salon of 1896 as Daniel dans la fosse aux lions and received an honourable mention, which Henry Ossawa Tanner called his first official recognition. The illustrated Salon catalogue reproduces it on page 71; in that reproduction Daniel lifts his head and looks upward, where the later version bends it. The Los Angeles County Museum of Art describes the first version as a vertical composition, half of it taken up by the shadowy, high-ceilinged structure above Daniel's head, with an elaborate Assyrian frieze. It went on to the Art Institute of Chicago that October, the Pennsylvania Academy in December and the International Art Exhibition in Munich in the summer of 1897.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington lists the 1896 canvas as location unknown, and Dewey F. Mosby's 1991 catalogue reproduces it from an old photograph with the same note. The Los Angeles museum states that its own painting has often been mistaken for the one shown at the Salon, and that it is a similar but later version.

A second version, on paper

The museum dates the second version to the years before the First World War, possibly as early as 1907, and states that although it is painted on paper it was made as an independent picture rather than a sketch. In 1976 conservators found an unfinished oil on the canvas used to back it, possibly a scene from the life of Job, dated on style to the late 1890s or early 1900s.

Henry Ossawa Tanner kept the scene but changed the format. The museum's notes record that he removed the ceiling to concentrate on the figure and enlarged the lit area to show more of the prisoner. He also dropped the frieze, which suited the academic taste of the 1890s rather than his mature style. It reads Daniel as calm, strengthened by his inner belief, and the blue-green palette as heightening that mood.

The museum links the dark cell lit from a high window to Jean-Paul Laurens, one of Henry Ossawa Tanner's teachers at the Académie Julian. Laurens's Grand Inquisiteur chez les rois catholiques of 1886 is also a painting about an unjust imprisonment. He owned a reproduction of it and kept it all his life; it survives among his papers.

How it reached Los Angeles

The artist kept the painting until 1918, when he sold it to William Preston Harrison and Ada Maria Harrison of Los Angeles. They gave it to the city's museum in 1922 as part of the Mr. and Mrs. William Preston Harrison Collection, and it carries the accession number 22.6.3. As of September 2026 the museum lists it as not on view.

A painting called Daniel in the Lions' Den appeared under Henry Ossawa Tanner's name at five shows between 1896 and 1914. They were the Pennsylvania Academy's annual show of 1896–97, the Pan-American Exposition at Buffalo in 1901 and the Louisiana Purchase Exposition at St Louis in 1904. Then came his 1908 show at the American Art Galleries in New York and the Anglo-American Exposition in London in 1914. The museum thinks the last two probably showed this version. It adds that the reviews are not specific enough to be sure.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

The picture is one colour and very little light, so the close views go where the light is: Daniel's bound hands, his face, the lion that faces the viewer, the eyes behind it, the window the light comes from, and the signature that says Paris.