About this work
Two figures, a night rooftop, and one of the most charged conversations in Scripture — painted small enough to hold in two hands. Here is the product description:
*Study for Christ and Nicodemus on a Rooftop* is an oil on wood panel measuring just 9½ × 13 inches (24 × 33 cm) — intimate in scale but enormous in atmosphere. Two robed figures are set against an open night sky above a Middle Eastern cityscape, the darkness broken by a distant glow that throws the scene into quiet relief. Tanner masterfully combines rich blues and greens to capture the evening atmosphere and imbue the work with an air of hushed secrecy.
The highly worked surface, with its thick paint application, is characteristic of the artist's mature work and further enhances the sense that the scene is cloaked by night, while the monumentalized figures give the composition a sense of depth and gravity. The encounter reads as private and urgent — two men leaning into a conversation the world was not meant to overhear.
This study made Henry Ossawa Tanner's reputation.
In 1899, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts purchased the finished work — a rare institutional validation for a Black American artist working at the turn of the century. The subject of Christ and Nicodemus was particularly important to the artist as it appealed to both his religious and racial concerns.
According to the book of John, Nicodemus, a ruler of the Jews, came to Jesus by night to ask him questions, and Jesus told him: "Except a man be born again, he cannot see the Kingdom of God."
The story of their night meeting spoke to African American worship habits that Tanner remembered from his youth: after emancipation, freed slaves continued to meet at night, as they had done when their masters had forbidden them to read the Bible.
Tanner painted this piece after recovering from a serious illness , lending the theme of rebirth an unmistakably personal resonance.
This is a painting that earns its wall. It belongs in a room that tolerates silence — a study, a library, a bedroom corridor where the light is low and the hour is late. Its deep nocturnal blues absorb artificial light rather than compete with it, making it quietly commanding rather than dominant. The viewer it speaks to is someone drawn to work that carries weight beyond its subject: to questions of faith, endurance, and spiritual seeking rendered without sentimentality. Tanner's works combined a preference for religious painting with a marked taste for a restricted palette associated with night settings — and in this small panel, both instincts converge with rare concentration.
