The Annunciation

by Old Masters

Artist - Henry Ossawa Tanner

Giclee on Canvas
Price includes frame.
30x24" $700
25x20" $525
20x16" $350
15x12" $275
10x8" $175

Henry Ossawa Tanner (June 21, 1859 – May 25, 1937) was an American artist and the first African American painter to gain international acclaim. After his own self-study in art as a young man, Tanner enrolled in 1879 at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in Philadelphia, the only black student in the school.
In 1891 Tanner moved to Paris, France, to study, and continued to live there after being accepted in French artistic circles.
He 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.