The leading African-American artist of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Henry Ossawa Tanner gained an international reputation chiefly through his religious paintings. The Three Marys is based on his 1910 painting of the same name that is in the collection of Carl Van Vechten Gallery of Fine Art at Fisk University in Nashville. It depicts a scene from the Bible (Mark 16:1–4) in which three women—Mary Magdalene; Mary, the mother of James; and Mary Salome—arrive at the tomb of Jesus to discover that the stone acting as a door has been rolled away. Upon entering the tomb, they are shocked to find it empty, and are told of Jesus’s resurrection.