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Henry Ossawa Tanner, Nicodemus Visiting Jesus, 1899
The verse belongs to a conversation. Nicodemus, a Pharisee and a member of the council, comes to Jesus under cover of darkness (John 3:1–2). Tanner, who had travelled to Palestine, seats the two on a flat roof above Jerusalem. The only warm light rises from the stairwell and falls on the teacher.
Tanner was the son of a bishop of the African Methodist Episcopal Church and lived in Paris from 1891. He travelled to Palestine in 1897 and again in 1898 to study light, landscape and people for his biblical pictures. The Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where he had once studied, bought the painting in 1900.
The light on Jesus has a source: it comes up the stairwell from the house below. Nicodemus sits with his back to it.
Under his name Tanner wrote where he painted the picture: Jerusalem.
