In the late 1930s, Madge Tennent began experimenting with monochromatic compositions in which she elicits the same sense of figural mass using variations in hues and empty space. The First Hawaiian Bible explores a distinct — and controversial — installment in Hawaii’s history: the impact of Protestant missionaries arrival in Hawaii in ca. 1820. Their successful campaign to convert the Hawaiians is evident in this painting, where we find two native women, hands clasped, reading the translated Bible.

Jean Charlot, himself one of Hawaii’s most accomplished artists and a close friend of Madge Tennent’s, perceived in her work a “search for the spirit of the Hawaiians threading their way undisturbed through the many phases of Hawaiian history [...] her wahine may thumb through the Paipala, the Bible, without essential change. She feels content that no preachment ever diminished the carnal reality of her models, wrapped in mu’umu’u and swathed in flowers.”

In a photo caption in her autobiography, Madge Tennent wrote of this work: “The First Hawaiian Bible, painted in Sanguine watercolor monochrome on the back of a canvas prepared for oil painting. The figures are lifesize.”