Family Pictures: The Impressionist Art Of Edmund C.Tarbel

Magazine Antiques, Nov, 2001 by Linda J. Docherty, Erica E. Hirshler, Susan Strickler

Painters have always used family members as models, but with the rise of impressionism in the late nineteenth century this practice became part of a larger project to interpret modem life. Charles Baudelaire's declaration that eternal beauty could be discovered in "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent" [1] served as a rallying cry for artists on both sides of the Atlantic who had felt constrained by the traditional academic hierarchy of subject matter. Proponents of the so-called new painting abandoned religious, historical, and literary subjects and focused their attention on the world of personal experience. They found in familiar people, places, and patterns of behavior inspiration and material for both individual and cultural definition.

Among American painters, few achieved more fully the impressionist symbiosis of public ambition and private life than Edmund C. Tarbell. From the outset of his career, this Boston artist engaged his family as models for both portraits and genre paintings. Tarbell's wife, in-laws, children, and grandchildren appear prominently in the pictures that he selected to make his reputation at regional, national, and international exhibitions. Using family images alone, one can trace his evolution from a technical innovator to a champion of traditional craftsmanship. Pictures of family provided Tarbell with a vehicle for modernist experimentation in the 1880s and 1890s; by the 1910s they had become emblems of his growing security and prosperity within the artistic establishment.

Tarbell's enthusiasm for family subjects also reflected a broader American interest in domestic life. In the decades following the Civil War, images of home and family gained in number and popularity. This subject not only bespoke a need for reassurance after years of fratricidal bloodshed but also marked a cultural transition from exploration to settlement. When the United States Bureau of the Census declared the frontier closed in 1890, the country began to define itself more by civilization than by conquest. In the arts, themes of home and hearth inspired an almost religious fervor, and representations of domestic subjects, sometimes cloaked in colonial garb, became laden with nationalistic sentiment.

Tarbell belonged to a generation of East Coast painters trained in Europe who created a new national art during the 1890s. These artists selected particularly American themes, depicting them in a manner that synthesized academic instruction and modernist experimentation. French impressionism continued to exert a powerful influence on these painters, who admired its individuality, vitality, and sense of place. They eschewed any unsavory aspects of its urban subject matter, however, and adapted impressionism's innovative methods to comfortable rural and domestic scenes. In representing his family as the epitome of modern life, Tarbell followed the lead of the French painters Edgar Degas, Claude Monet, and Berthe Morisot and the Americans Mary Cassatt and William Merritt Chase.

That Tarbell would so regularly portray his family (see Fig. 2) and use them to define his artistic and cultural ambitions could not have been anticipated from his upbringing. Born in 1862 in West Groton, Massachusetts, to a family with deep New England roots, Tarbell lost his father when he was only two. Following his mother's remarriage and subsequent move to Milwaukee, the artist and his sister, Nellie (1861-1905), were reared in Boston by their paternal grandparents, Edmund and Sophia Tarbell. By age ten, young Edmund had determined to become an artist, and in 1877 he became an apprentice at the W. H. Forbes Lithographic Company. Two years later he enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston under the tutelage of Otto Grundmann (1844-1890) and Frederic Crowninshield (1845-1918). Around this time Tarbell met Emeline Arnold Souther, also from Boston, who became not only the subject of his earliest surviving portrait (P1. III), but also a romantic attachment and ultimately, in 1888, his wife.

Like most American artists of his generation, Tarbell aspired to complete his education in the celebrated schools of France. He left Boston for Paris in October 1884, enrolling briefly in the Academie Julian, but when an outbreak of cholera forced him to flee the city, he traveled with his friend and fellow artist Abbott Fuller Graves (1859-1936) to London, Brussels, Antwerp, Cologne, Munich, and finally Venice, whose picturesque atmosphere he found particularly energizing. While Emeline encouraged and supported Tarbell's ambitions, the months apart tried their patience. The artist had to squelch her jealousy after he praised a beautiful young Venetian model, and he returned to Boston during the summer of 1885, allegedly because she was seeing another man. Tarbell proposed marriage at this time but returned to Paris in the fall, where he worked at Julian's with increased diligence. His artistic efforts and long separation from Emeline were rewarded in the spring of 1886 when his painting Le Lecteur (unlocated ) was accepted into the prestigious annual Salon.