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"The Annunciation" 1898 by Henry Ossawa Tanner

"The Annunciation" 1898 by Henry Ossawa Tanner

"The Annunciation" painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1898). Tanner was the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. He moved to Par...
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"The Annunciation" painted by Henry Ossawa Tanner (1898). Tanner was the first African-American painter to gain international acclaim. He moved to Paris in 1891 to study, and decided to stay there, being readily accepted in French artistic circles. 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.
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