Daniel in the Lions' Den

LACMA dates this canvas to 1907-1918, the height of Tanner's Paris years, when he had become the most internationally celebrated African American painter of his generation. Trained initially under Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Tanner relocated permanently to France in 1891, where he found both professional acceptance and freedom from the racial hostility that constrained his career at home. His biblical subjects, which he first visited on a journey to Palestine in 1897 and 1898, were grounded in direct observation of Middle Eastern landscape and dress rather than in academic convention. Symbolism and late Tonalism inflected his palette throughout this period, and the deep blue-green that saturates Daniel in the Lions' Den recurs across his religious canvases as a near-signature of divine immanence. The painting is held in the collection of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and it stands among the most formally resolved of his Old Testament subjects, praised by contemporaries for its spiritual force and its refusal to stage the moment as dramatic spectacle. Where Victorian painters typically rendered the scene as a tableau of terror narrowly averted, Tanner chose the aftermath of faith: a man and beasts held together in an uncanny, God-given peace.