Family Pictures: The Impressionist Art Of Edmund C.Tarbel

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

The more tightly drawn and intricately posed figures, coupled with the large size of the canvas, suggest Tarbell's ambition was not only to continue his impressionist work but also to compete with French academic art. Tarbell sent In the Orchard to the World's Columbian Exposition, along with My Sister Lydia and a monumental canvas of Emeline with a horse (Girl and Horse, 1892, private collection). Together, the paintings demonstrated to an international audience the range of the artist's talent and his debt to the family who modeled for him.

Heralded as distinctively modem and particularly American, In the Orchard established Tarbell as a leader among the foreign trained painters who had returned to work on native soil. The Boston critic William Howe Downes (1854-1941) called it "one of the most remarkable paintings American art can boast of."[11] Frederick W. Coburn (1870- 1953) praised the artist for having "the audacity to paint conventional society without artistic conventions." [12] Tarbell's originality resided in his power to give innovative pictorial form to a life that was familiar.

Tarbell used his growing family to explore the relationships between his subjects. Mother and Child in a Boat of 1892 (P1. I) was probably painted at Dublin Lake, near Mount Monadnock in southern New Hampshire, where the artist spent several weeks that summer with his fellow artists and friends Frank Weston Benson (1862-1951) and Abbott Handerson Thayer (1849-1921). It marked the beginning of a working pattern that became habitual for Tarbell, as it was for many American painters, of summers in the country painting outdoors and winters in the city working in the studio. Mother and Child in a Boat exhibits the flattened perspective and asymmetrical composition that Tarbell and other impressionists admired in Japanese prints and screens. While the artist's emphasis was on formal innovation, the maternal bond evident between his wife and daughter adds to the picture's charm.

As Tarbell's daughters and son replaced his in-laws as models for plein-air work, his images became less theatrical. My Family at Cotuit of 1900 (private collection) and Breakfast on the Piazza of 1902 (P1. VII) depict Emeline and their four children immersed in the pleasant rituals of summer by the water. Tarbell exhibited both pictures with the Ten American Painters, a group of modern painters who had defected from the Society of American Artists in 1898, complaining about the quality of its annual shows. Along with fellow members of the Ten, Childe Hassam (1859-1935), John Henry Twachtman (1853-1902), and Julian Alden Weir (1852-1919), Tarbell increasingly used impressionist methods to reflect identification with a specific place. Breakfast on the Piazza was painted in the coastal village of New Castle, New Hampshire, near Portsmouth, where he and his family had summered for approximately a decade. In 1905 the artist purchased a simple Greek revival style house on several acres along the banks of the Pisca taqua River. Within a few years he tripled the size of the house, built a studio, stables, and tennis courts, and planted gardens. In New Castle, Tarbell created a wholesome and active private world that would become integrally linked to his public representations of modern family life.