About this work
Two figures meet on a rooftop at night — and the question the painting asks is both ancient and immediate: where is the light coming from? *Study for Nicodemus Visiting Jesus* depicts the biblical encounter between Nicodemus and Christ in the evening, placing it firmly within Tanner's tradition of nocturnal light paintings, in which the world is rendered in night light. The scene is set on a Jerusalem rooftop, two figures in close, private conversation against a darkened sky. What arrests the viewer is the luminosity of Christ's figure: in the study, Christ is silhouetted by the moon, creating a distinct halo effect — bolder and more direct than the more nuanced treatment Tanner would employ in the finished canvas. The sky carries the blue-filtered wash of twilight; moonlight casts warmer green-yellow tones across the rooftop and distant architecture; and a warm orange glow — as from a candle or fire below — rises from the stairwell, catching the face of Christ. In this small-format study, Tanner was not refining detail so much as solving a problem of sacred light.
The painting was made in Jerusalem in 1899, during Tanner's second visit to Palestine.
It was inspired by the Gospel of John 3:1–21 , a passage with particular resonance in Tanner's household: the story held special significance for his father, Benjamin Tucker Tanner, who considered it "biblical precedent for the worship habits of African-American slaves" in their practice of worshiping at night. The finished work would go on to become one of the most celebrated of his career — it was Tanner's entry to the 1899 Paris Salon, was later purchased for the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, and won the Lippincott Prize for the best figurative work at PAFA's annual exhibition. The study, an oil on canvas mounted on cardboard and held in a private collection , offers something the finished painting does not: an unguarded view of the artist thinking through light as theology.
This is a work for rooms that reward stillness — a study, library, or bedroom where the low warmth of lamplight echoes the painting's own nocturnal palette. Its compact scale and intimate subject make it quietly commanding rather than declarative. The viewer it calls to is one drawn to images that carry spiritual weight without liturgical grandeur — someone attuned to the way Tanner fuses the documentary precision of a painter who had stood on that Jerusalem rooftop with the deeper mystery of what two figures, meeting in darkness, might say to each other.
