Detail of The Annunciation by Henry Ossawa Tanner in the Philadelphia Museum of Art, August 2009

The Annunciation

Henry Ossawa Tanner, American (active France), 1859 - 1937

Geography: Made in Paris, France, Europe

Date: 1898

Medium: Oil on canvas

Dimensions: 57 x 71 1/4 inches (144.8 x 181 cm) Framed: 73 3/4 x 87 1/4 inches (187.3 x 221.6 cm)

Curatorial Department: American Art

Object Location: Gallery 111, American Art, first floor

Accession Number: W1899-1-1

Credit Line: Purchased with the W. P. Wilstach Fund, 1899

Label:
Tanner painted The Annunciation soon after returning to Paris from a trip to Egypt and Palestine in 1897. The son of a minister in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner specialized in religious subjects, and wanted to experience the people, culture, architecture, and light of the Holy Land. Influenced by what he saw, Tanner created an unconventional image of the moment when the angel Gabriel announces to Mary that she will bear the Son of God. Mary is shown as an adolescent dressed in rumpled Middle Eastern peasant clothing, without a halo or other holy attributes. Gabriel appears only as a shaft of light. Tanner entered this painting in the 1898 Paris Salon exhibition, after which it was bought for the Philadelphia Museum of Art in 1899, making it his first work to enter an American museum.

Text from: www.philamuseum.org/collections/permanent/104384.html?mulR=18222095|6