Family Pictures: The Impressionist Art Of Edmund C.Tarbel

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

More than any other painting, My Family demonstrates how Tarbell's family served his art. The picture resembles In the Orchard compositionally but lacks the earlier work's conviviality. Tarbell shows Emeline and the children absorbed in their thoughts. They silently hold their places in an arrangement that includes colonial and Federal antiques, Asian ceramics, wicker furniture, and bowls of fruit and flowers. Psychologically, the five figures appear isolated from one another, but artistically they are skillfully balanced and intertwined. Light filtered through the diamon-paned windows bathes the scene in atmosphere and strengthens the impression of aesthetic unity. My Family was introduced at the first exhibition of the Guild of Boston Artists, a group founded in 1914 (with Tarbell as its first president) that was dedicated to the highest standards of professionalism in the arts. The painting was greeted with critical accolades. "As to technical ability, beauty of execution, and facility of handling," declar ed the Boston Record, "it is the last word in picture making." [20]

Tarbell's growing professional success coincided with increased scope and specificity in representations of his family at New Castle. In indoor and outdoor scenes alike the artist created an appealing image of leisure and prosperity. Along with his art, Tarbell enjoyed a lifelong passion for the athletic life--golf, tennis, and especially horses--which he imparted equally to his daughters and son. My Children in the Woods (P1. VIII), shows Tarbell's four children with two of their horses in the shelter of a shady grove. The sun shines down through the branches of tall pine trees; in the distance can be seen the waters near Little Harbor. In this equestrian conversation piece, thirteen-year-old Edmund Arnold Tarbell occupies center stage through pose and placement and the darker color of his mount. While distinctively American in figures and landscape, this image harks back to an English tradition of portraying the gentleman sportsman on his estate.

Having represented his family as exemplary of genteel modern life, Tarbell returned in his final years to individual portraiture. Less self-consciously artful than his early exhibition paintings of Emeline and Lydia, these works are documents of a patriarch's affection. The value Tarbell placed on his personal as well as his artistic legacy is apparent in Margety and Little Edmund (Pl. XI), a sunlit paean to the male child destined to carry forth the family name. Compared to Mother and Child in a Boat, in which two figures appear as one, primary attention rests here on the painter's grandson and namesake, Edmund Charles II. Tarbell now adopted a more descriptive style, evidence perhaps of the influence of photography on his late portrait practice. This combination of domesticity and realism made Margery and Little Edmund particularly appealing to those American viewers bewildered by the modernist movement toward abstraction. The vote of the general public accorded the painting the Popular Prize at the 1928 Carnegie Institute exhibition in Pittsburgh. The following year the picture won the Isidor Medal for best Figure composition at the National Academy, proof that his credo "making it like" had not ceased to serve the interests of beauty.