Floating Veil

                                 Henry O. Tanner: The Disciplines See Christ walking on the Water                     1907

      Tanner, a bishop’s son, was very fond of the biblical themes and repeatedly depicted Christ’s scenes from the holy book. He knew how it felt being bullied and mocked since he was an African American in the nineteenth century. When in the art school in Pennsylvania, his classmates tied Tanner to the easel and put him out in the busy street. So he knew it.

      Many artists chose Christ walking on the water as their subject, for example Ivan Aivazovsky, who did it in a fine, romantically realistic way. Tanner, on the other hand, painted a rather dreamlike scene. For the sky and the water he used the same blue so we had a unified surface. The shagged disciples are in the boat looking at Christ’s ghostly figure above the lake. He is like a floating veil.

      I am a little bit confused of the fact that the lake is not rough and no wind at all while Jesus is still walking on the water; I thought after he whist the wind he climbed back into the boat along Peter. Maybe Tanner preferred the scene in that way more. I will not be flustered because of this hitch. Tanner has been entitled to do so by right of his artistic freedom.

      At Tanner’s vision we see more like the disciples saw Christ shortly before dawn: as an apparition, an unworldly spirit as he was. He has no face, no feet, no corporeal being: he is levitating on the picture.

      If any of us ever saw him, he would appear like this, like only a touch of love.