2. Two Disciples at the Tomb, c. 1905.
Henry Ossawa Tanner (1859-1937).
Oil on canvas; 129.5 x 106.4 cm (51 x 41 7/8 in.). Robert A. Waller Fund (1906.300).
Once dubbed the “Poet Painter of the Holy Land,” 1 Henry Ossawa Tanner was perhaps the most renowned North American painter of religious scenes at the turn of the twentieth century. His achievements were recognized both in the United States, where he first took up painting, and in France, where he spent the better part of his adult life. In its day one of Tanner’s celebrated works, Two Disciples at the Tomb was inspired by the Gospel of Saint John. The painting depicts Peter and John as they arrive at Christ’s tomb, which they find empty except for the slain prophet’s linen shroud. Like other paintings by Tanner, Two Disciples at the Tomb focuses on the individual’s response to miraculous events such as the Resurrection.
As the son of a prominent minister of the African Methodist Episcopal Church, Tanner was familiar with the importance of Christian symbolism to African Americans. The theme of resurrection in particular corresponded to the sense of social redemption that followed President Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation of 1862. As the black writer and intellectual W. E. B. DuBois noted in 1903, “For fifty years Negro religion . . . transformed itself with the dream of abolition. . . . Thus, when Emancipation finally came, it seemed to freedmen a literal Coming of the Lord.” 2 In Tanner’s painting, the discovery of Christ’s resurrection can be seen as a modern allegory of the salvation of African Americans from slavery.
