H

ENRY OSSAWA TANNER is unlike any other artist who ever lived. In the first place, he is of negro blood. He is the son of Bishop Tanner, of the African Methodist Church, and he was born and "brought up" in Philadelphia. He does not live in Philadelphia any more, nor in this country. He lives in Paris, and he does so because here he is reminded of his race, there he is treated purely as an artist. Yet he does not resemble a certain too-often-accepted type. If one study his face, there is seen something which hints of African descent, but his color is brown, his hair and beard are thin, his eyes look at you with a Saxon directness, his nose is Greek, his mouth is sensitive, his physique is supple and light, his manner is quiet, easy, courteous, dignified. He has become more than ever associated with the whites by marrying a white woman. MM. Benjamin Constant, Gérome, and, in short, all the leaders of French painting to-day, have recognized in Mr. Tanner a true artist and man; they have come to esteem him as much for his personal qualities as for those which he has shown in his work. That work itself shows both illuminating intelligence and the ingredients of a noble personality.

Mr. Tanner's religious pictures start out on a true Southern foundation of heartily expressed emotion. This accounts, however, for but half of their appeal to us. The other half is due to the fact that the emotion is expressed with a Northern exactness. As we look at these canvases we detect no obscurities of drawing, no incoherence of color. We cannot escape from the impact of clearness and unity. On this as a foundation, past and present costumes and customs and historical and religious scenes of Palestine-for many of the pictures were painted in that country-are portrayed for us with an accuracy and a realism which a Tissot might employ, yet with no dead weight of overelaboration. In short, the Tanner work is rarely original, suggestive and inspiring.

Whether judged from its import to the

development of painting or to the development of religion, Americans have ap parently not yet so fully appreciated the value of Mr. Tanner's work as have the French. His pictures have been hung on the line in many a Salon exhibition, and now the Government of France has crowned the long list of medals and prizes which Mr. Tanner has received by buying one of his most important works, "The Raising of Lazarus," for the Luxembourg Gallery. The picture has already been hung in the Luxembourg, and in the course of time will naturally be transferred to the Louvre, in accordance with the well-known rules of the two great State galleries. Hence, the "Raising of Lazarus" is to most people the best known of Mr. Tanner's religious pictures. It is perhaps the most realistic of them all. Other men in other times have depicted the same scene, but have hardly realized it with so broad yet simple imagination. They certainly have not given to it a greater intensity in the awakening from death to life. Mr. Tanner's picture, however, differs from the wonderful etching by Rembrandt and from almost every other representation of the subject in not making the figure of Christ an overshadowingly prominent one. Christ stands before the body of Lazarus, not nearer to it than any of the others about. The whole grouping has dramatic unity and naturalness. The figure of our Lord, however, does not lose in majesty by such treatment; on the contrary, it really gains. The Christ is not forced on one; he appeals first as man, like any other man, standing alongside other men; gradually he appeals as God, and the longer one studies him the more inevitable seems his power to work such a miracle. For the moment we forget that it is a miracle; it translates us so immediately into the actual incident that it becomes to us a matter of course that Lazarus should die and that Christ should raise him from the dead.

A marked and welcome quality is observable in all the Tanner pictures,

whether those of landscapes (showing the width of the artist's range) or those of Bible characters and scenes. That qual ity is atmosphere. The trees stand out against the landscape; you breathe around them. The figures stand out from their environment, as does the head of our Lord in the "Nicodemus," with the sleeping city in the distance, and the beautiful blue, cool, enveloping moonlight all about. Flashed up from an artificial light burning in a room below stairs, a soft, dim yellow glow falls upon Christ's breast. This combination of the two lights symbolizes as well as anything our artist's all-embracing sense of the realistic, yet apparently ever in the service of the ideal. His quickness in grasping what some artists do not emphasize, as well as his sense of the patently dramatic, may thus be noted, not only in such scenes as the Raising of Lazarus (which would naturally evoke it), but also even in the quiet conversation on the housetop. Such a force it is, evident in unexpected places, which illustrates the potentialities of life. A similar naturalness, but an even

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greater force and dignity, characterize the religious canvas exhibited this winter at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts at Philadelphia, which has now purchased it for the Temple collection. a study of Christ and Nicodemus. More quickly than do most religious pictures, it transports us to the spiritual atmosphere of the East. The two figures are seated on the stone roof of a Jerusalem housetop. That of Nicodemus represents a dignified old man, with long beard and flowing robes, bent figure, and head still more bent, leaning forward to listen to the divine words which his younger companion is speaking. Jesus sits on the parapet and immediately faces the spectators of the picture. His face is somewhat ascetic, with straight black hair and beard, high forehead, blazing eyes, decidedly marked nose and mouth, a

This picture took a medal at the Paris Exposition and it received the Lippincott prize at Philadelphia. It has been owned by Mr. Rodman Wanamaker, who was a benefactor of Mr. Tanner in other days when the artist was struggling for recognition. It is understood that Mr. Wanamaker has bought in advance the two pictures which Mr. Tanner will exhibit in the Salons of 1900 and 1901.

certain leanness of flesh, and a patent mingling of sternness and yearning in the expression. While it seems as spiritual as anything Fra Angelico painted four hundred and more years ago, or as anything which M. Dagnan-Bouveret paints to-day, it is more virile than the work of either of those time-separated, spirit-united painters. In religious feel ing Mr. Tanner seems nearer to Fra Bartolommeo than to any other artist, past or present. As in Fra Bartolommeo's masterpiece, the soul-moving "Descent from the Cross," hanging in the Pitti Palace in Florence, so here in Mr. Tanner's masterpiece hanging in Philadelphia, so subtle is the painter's power as not only to make one feel that which the characters of the picture, Christ and Nicodemus, are exchanging-one may even dare to think their thoughts after them.

A larger and, from the standpoint of spiritual idealism, very remarkable pic ture is "The Annunciation," which now hangs in the "Memorial Hall," one of the remaining tokens of the World's Exposition of 1876 at Philadelphia. There is more than a reminder of Rossetti's treatment

of the same subject in the girlishness of Mary as she rises, half dreamfully, half wonderingly, from her couch, her drapery falling about her in statuesque, unlabored folds. While Rossetti, Burne-Jones, and the now classic delineators of "The Annunciation" have given a distinct representation of the angel, in Mr. Tanner's picture there is no angel; instead there is a great effulgent light which streams in from the side and awakens the startled girl. An illustration may reproduce the lines of the painting, but no illustration can reproduce Mr. Tanner's beautiful color in this or in any other of his works. It is so clean-cut, thorough, pure, that when we see one of his pictures in an exhibition alongside those by other artists, we gaze upon it with a grateful sense of refreshment. The luminous quality of his paint removes us quickly from commonplace crudity and garishness. It is like the difference between the rich vegetable dyes of an Oriental rug and the miserable aniline colors which we see in cheap carpets. While we may have expected to be more impressed by Mr. Tanner's drawing, in the last analysis it is perhaps

his color which stays with us longer; its quality is akin to that of precious stones. The Annunciation" would appeal to us powerfully from the sensuous fascination of its color alone, even if it were not here in a higher sense a symbol of the greatest event in the Christian world-the Incarnation.

Another excellence which this painter possesses in his religious pictures is that of depicting strictly Oriental and Jewish scenes, and yet giving to us no merely Hebrew types, but world-types. The figure of Nicodemus, for instance, might be that of an old man in any country-a world-craving for knowledge; the figure of Mary in "The Annunciation," that of any young girl-the awakening of human ity by divinity.

Few artists have attempted to represent the flight of Judas after he had betrayed his Lord. In Mr. Tanner's portrayal of this

scene (in the Carnegie Gallery at Pittsburg) we see in nineteen-twentieths of the picture a vast Judean landscape, with the battlements of Jerusalem peering over the horizon, and, down in one corner, in one of the deep, rugged valleys, the swinging body of the traitor and the approaching figure of a passer-by, who in another moment will discover the tragedy. Through this simple means the painter conveys the sense of surprise and horror, which otherwise might not be so strong, to us who are looking at the picture. Rarely has any one expressed more completely than has our artist the aridity and desolation of the world which must press in upon the soul of him who has turned his back upon the Holy. In this picture the Tanner idea of dramatic power seems to be carried to the most forceful expression yet achieved; it has the accent of inspiration.