Henry Ossawa Tanner

lived from 1859 until 1923 and was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, to a minister father, who was a free Black man, and a mother who had been freed through the Underground Railroad. Tanner lived most of his professional life in France.

Throughout art history, the annunciation — that instant when the angel appeared to the Virgin Mary to tell her that she would be the mother of the Messiah — has been a popular theme in religious painting. Many of these paintings are beautiful, but also tend to be stiff and reverential rather than alive and convincing. Others are cloyingly sweet, flowing over with schmaltzy religiosity, and are not very believable in human terms. But Henry Ossawa Tanner’s The Annunciation manages to be both lovely and emotionally resonant and at the same time feel utterly convincing. By the sheer ordinariness of this depiction of the intersection between the divine and human, we are reminded that God communicates to perfectly ordinary human beings in perfectly ordinary circumstances. And the holiness that infuses the picture is less in the flood of golden light and more in the look on Mary’s face, captured in the moment when fear is beginning to give way to contemplation and then acceptance. Her hands are folded in her lap, her head tilted upward, and her eyes focused. There is receptivity in her body language, an openness to God’s will. Because the angel is presented in such an abstract form, all the focus of the painting is upon Mary. She is a reflection of the light, and it is through her posture and attitude that we experience the calm, the peace, and the holiness that fills the room. She is our clue to how we are to read this moment of revelation. As in many of Tanner’s paintings, it is through his focus on the figure who is receiving the light of revelation that we begin to understand something supernatural is taking place before our eyes.  

Adapted from Terry Glaspey’s 2021 book, 75 Masterpieces Every Christian Should Know (Moody)