About this work
The eye goes to the sky first — and in this painting, the sky is everything. Tanner used his favourite hue, a distinctive greenish-blue, to dominate the heavens even as a smoky conflagration engulfs the two cities below. The composition is panoramic and low-horizoned, spreading the catastrophe across a wide, almost cinematic plane. Billowing columns of smoke and fire erupt from the cities in the middle distance, but Tanner withholds the expected drama of narrative detail — there are no fleeing figures, no pillar of salt rendered in faithful brushwork. Instead, the painting's abstraction and simplicity of form evoke a sense of interaction between the physical and spiritual worlds. The palette is both strange and hypnotic: the cool, unearthly blue-green of the atmosphere pushed against the warm amber and ochre of the burning plain below, a collision of the divine and the devastated.
Executed in tempera and varnish on cardboard between 1929 and 1930 , and now held in the J. J. Haverty Collection at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta, this is a work of Tanner's final decade — a period marked by both personal grief and continued artistic inquiry. His wife Jessie had died in 1925, and Tanner grieved her deeply through the 1920s, eventually selling the family home where they had been so happy together.
He painted *Destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah* after two trips to Palestine , bringing to the Old Testament subject the same grounded, firsthand knowledge of Middle Eastern light and landscape that had defined his biblical work for thirty years. By this stage in his career, Tanner had shifted decisively from the visual clarity favoured by nineteenth-century academic art toward a mood of personalised spiritual mystery more aligned with the twentieth-century symbolists. The result is a work that feels less like illustration and more like vision.
As wall art, this painting belongs in spaces that can absorb its gravity — a library, a study, a large living room with ample wall. Its predominantly cool palette, anchored by that signature blue-green, reads with exceptional calm from a distance, making it well-suited to rooms lit by north-facing or indirect natural light, where the subtlety of the tempera surface can breathe. It speaks to viewers drawn to art that sits at the intersection of the sacred and the elemental — those who understand that the most powerful biblical imagery is not necessarily the most literal. There is no thunder here, only the terrible quiet of a world ending, rendered in colour and atmosphere by an artist who had spent a lifetime learning how light carries meaning.
