Edmund Tarbell 1862-1938

"Tarbell's Girl Types," Boston Sunday Herald, December 21, 2002, illustrated p. 21
Laurene Buckley, Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity, New York, 2001, illustrated p. 88

Edmund Tarbell featured prominently among the artists of the Boston School, and was admired as both a portraitist and painter of domestic interiors.  Following five years’ study in Europe, Tarbell returned to Boston in 1888, taking a teaching job at the Museum School and continuing with his own impressionist work.  According to R.H. Ives Gammell, “He was not literary, but he had a rare perception of beauty, which is the poetry of painting.  It was this indefinable quality which caused his fellow painters to regard Edmund C. Tarbell as the head of the Boston School, even to name him the most eminent American painter of his generation which not a few proclaimed him to be.  …[He] painted pictures which are permeated by a unique blend of rare qualities in which carefully ordered composition, lovely color schemes exquisitely rendered and subtle depictions of the interplay of light and atmosphere combine to delight the eye.  These visual impressions are put on canvas with a personal touch which makes every inch of the painted surface treasurable” (The Boston Painters: 1900-1930, Orleans, Massachusetts, 1986, pp. 67, 68).

Contemplation appeared in the December 21, 1902 issue of the Boston Sunday Herald as part of an illustrated feature titled “Tarbell’s Girl Types.”  Laurene Buckley writes, “What makes these women all of one ‘type’?  Clearly, the answer lies in their sleek lines, upper-class apparel, and quiet, self-absorbed demeanor—all suggesting a woman of the leisure class who, although sometimes attired in outing clothes, appears most comfortable in a solitary, domestic role.  The Herald’s names for the women…recall biblical and literary muses, further idealizing the women who inhabit Tarbell’s costume pieces.  At a time of growing frustration for those women not allowed to share the working world of men, Tarbell’s types presented an unchanging feminine tradition, safely segregated from the changing demographics and social turmoil outside the home” (Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity, New York, 2001, p. 88).

This painting retains its original frame by Foster Brothers Makers, Boston, Massachusetts.