About this work
*Moses in the Bullrushes* is an oil on wood panel, measuring approximately 22 × 15 inches — intimate in scale, but vast in atmosphere. The scene draws from the Book of Exodus: Moses' mother has set her infant son adrift in the Nile in a basket of reeds, hoping to spare him from Pharaoh's soldiers.
Tanner chooses the precise moment of Pharaoh's daughter discovering the child in the water.
Muted blues dominate the canvas, capturing a nighttime scene where moonlight reflecting on the water carries the suggestion of divine presence.
Where earlier painters such as Alma-Tadema rendered this same subject in daylight and vibrant colour, Tanner's more abstract treatment bathes the scene in nocturnal blue hues, locating Moses' abandonment in a moon-lit night. The small panel rewards close looking: Tanner's layering technique caused oil glazes to bead up against tempera, creating a reticulated, floating effect on the water's surface — making the Nile itself seem to shimmer with a life beyond paint.
By 1921, Tanner had long since settled permanently in Paris and was deep into his mature biblical phase. His palette had become so characteristically dominated by blue that contemporaries referred to a signature "Tanner blues."
He built his paintings up through multiple layers of colour, sandwiching oil and resin between layers of pigmented or unpigmented tempera made to his own recipe — a process that produced an almost luminescent, otherworldly depth impossible to achieve by conventional means. Given the clandestine nature of Moses' abandonment, and the grief of surrendering a child into fate's hands, the pervading blue is a tonally fitting choice. The work also carries a resonance particular to Tanner: a child of African descent whose family escaped bondage through the Underground Railroad, he could hardly have been unmoved by a story of a people's liberation beginning with one mother's act of defiant love.
This is a painting for rooms where quietude is intentional — a study, a reading corner, a bedroom where morning light arrives gently. The near-monochrome palette means it lives easily alongside warm neutrals, aged wood, and natural linens without competing for attention. It speaks to viewers drawn to the intersection of the spiritual and the painterly: those who want a work that holds meaning without announcing it. The darkness here is not melancholy but watchful, and the glimmer on the water — whether moonlight or something more — is the kind of detail a viewer keeps returning to.
