(1862–1938)
Edmund C. Tarbell took drawing classes in Boston as a boy and apprenticed at a lithography firm as a teenager. Refusing to go to college, he instead took classes at the School of Drawing and Painting at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, from 1879 to 1884. After studying at the Académie Julian in Paris and traveling in Europe for two years, Tarbell returned to Boston in 1886, establishing himself with modern, fluidly painted portraits that anticipated his Impressionist style.
Just as Bostonians had begun to collect Barbizon paintings in the 1860s, before the style swept the nation in the 1870s and 1880s, they supported Americans working in an Impressionist style in the late 1880s, before it became the dominant style in the course of the 1890s. When Tarbell enthusiastically embraced Impressionism in 1890, he could count on the precedents set by the Boston favorite John Singer Sargent, who had been painting in an Impressionist style for several years, and Tarbell’s fellow teacher at Boston’s Cowles Art School, Dennis Miller Bunker, who painted Impressionist landscapes from 1888 until his untimely death in 1890.
During the 1890s, Tarbell painted sunny, plein air figural works inspired by Claude Monet and Pierre-Auguste Renoir during the summers, and during the winter months, he worked on lower-key Impressionist interiors, which were closer in style to William Merritt Chase and James McNeill Whistler, but which also incorporated influences from seventeenth-century Dutch painting and classical Greek and Roman art.
Tarbell’s interiors brought him national attention at the World’s Columbian Exposition in 1893, and he also won the Shaw Prize at the Society of American Artists for The Bath, 1892-93 (private collection) in that year. He continued to win prizes for his Arrangement in Pink and Gray, c. 1894 (Worcester Art Museum, Massachusetts), which received the First Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy of Design in 1894, and both the Temple Gold Medal and the Lippincott Prize at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts in 1895. In 1897 Tarbell seceded from the Society of American Artists and became a founding member of the Impressionist group the Ten American Painters.
Tarbell was not only one of America’s best-known painters in the early twentieth century, but also one of its most influential teachers. Together with his friend, the artist Frank W. Benson, he took leadership of the Museum School in 1890, influencing generations of local painters who became known as the Boston School. He later served as director of the Corcoran School of Art.