The Two Disciples at the Tomb

Chicago, 1906

Henry Ossawa Tanner sent the painting from Paris to the Art Institute of Chicago's nineteenth annual exhibition of oil paintings and sculpture by American artists, which ran from 16 October to 29 November 1906. It was number 295 in the catalogue. The museum bought it directly from him the same year through the Robert A. Waller Fund and gave it the accession number 1906.300.

The Art Institute awarded it the Norman W. Harris prize, established that year with $500 for the best painting by an American artist in the annual exhibition, and bought it for the permanent collection. Dewey F. Mosby's 1991 catalogue quotes the citation: the prize was for the most impressive and distinguished work of art of the season. Two days after the exhibition opened, The Washington Post reported it under the headline Award for Negro Artist. The painting had been shown in Paris that summer at the American Art Students' Club, and it went to the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in January 1907.

The picture went on to Henry Ossawa Tanner's exhibition of religious paintings at the American Art Galleries in New York in December 1908, as number 10. It was later lent to the Philadelphia Museum of Art's retrospective of 1991 and to Across Continents and Cultures at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in Kansas City in 1995.

Paris around 1906

By 1906 Henry Ossawa Tanner had lived in France for fifteen years. He had married Jessie Macauley Olssen in 1899, their son Jesse Ossawa Tanner was born in 1903, and the family divided its time between Paris and Trépied, near Étaples on the Channel coast. In May 1906 the Salon gave a second-class medal to his Disciples at Emmaus, which the French government bought for the Luxembourg, and he was made hors concours, free to show at the Salon without passing the jury. Dewey F. Mosby calls the medal the highest recognition the jury could give him, since the first-class medal was reserved for French artists.

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art, writing about his Daniel in the Lions' Den, describes the style of these years. Colour and light were used to evoke the essence of a religious story, and experiments in pigments and glazing from about 1907 gave his pictures a soft, glowing light. The Two Disciples at the Tomb comes from the start of that period.

The Art Institute's record gives Paris as the place of origin and reads the picture through its two faces: "The bearded Peter looks downward with a somber gaze, but John appears transfixed, his face bathed in a golden light that signifies the presence of Christ's spirit." It adds that Henry Ossawa Tanner, the son of an African Methodist Episcopal minister, was perhaps the most renowned American painter of religious works at the turn of the century. He had moved to France in 1891, the record says, to escape the racism that limited his career at home. The art historian James A. Porter later called it a bold conception that depended, like a cinematic close-up, on the power of the human face to convey pathos. Porter called it the apogee of his religious paintings, in a passage Mosby quotes.

Close reading

Reading the work, detail by detail

Almost everything in the picture is dark except two faces and a band of light at the left. Close views take the lit face, the shadowed one, the clasped hands, the white shirt, the light itself and the signature.