About this work
This profoundly blue painting re-creates a storied scene from the early life of Moses, the Hebrew prophet featured in the Book of Exodus.
Moses's mother had set her infant son adrift on the Nile in a basket of reeds so that Pharaoh's soldiers would not slay the Hebrew child,
and it is the moment of the Pharaoh's daughter discovering the baby in the water that Tanner chooses to render. Where other painters treated this subject with daylight pageantry and crowded riverbanks, Tanner strips it back to near-abstraction. The muted blues capture a nighttime scene, where the moonlight reflecting on the water carries the suggestion of God's presence.
The figures, bathed in blue hues, seem to materialise during a moon-lit night — a choice that honours the clandestine nature of Moses's abandonment and the grief of surrendering one's child into the care of strangers. The palette is almost monochromatic, yet deeply layered: cool shadows dissolve into one another across the surface of the water, and the reeds emerge more as felt atmosphere than rendered form.
*Moses in the Bullrushes* was painted in 1921, executed in oil on wood panel — a compact, intimate work measuring just over twenty-two inches tall. By this point in his career, Tanner had long since committed his practice entirely to sacred subject matter. From 1895 onwards, his output was almost entirely religious, dedicated to painting atmospheric biblical scenes with landscapes inspired by his visits to the Middle East.
His palette had become characteristic for its heavy use of blue, so much so that his contemporaries referred to the "Tanner blues." Technically, the effect was hard-won: analysis reveals a technique of sandwiching layers of oil and resin between layers of pigmented tempera — a method that caused the oil glaze to bead up into a reticulated, floating effect.
Though Tanner took most of his themes from the New Testament, the story of Moses held particular power for him, and he returned to it in several paintings. The parallel was unmistakable: a child born into a world that sought to destroy him, rescued and delivered toward an extraordinary destiny.
This is a painting for rooms that reward stillness — a reading room with low evening light, a study lined with dark wood, a bedroom where the walls can hold something contemplative. Tanner's choice of a blue palette sets the work apart from other renditions of the same scene; where comparable paintings depict daytime scenes of colour and vibrance, his more abstract approach finds Moses in the hush of a moon-lit night. It speaks to the viewer drawn
