TARBELL, Edmund Charles - b. 1862 West Groton, d. 1938 New Castle

American painter, illustrator and teacher. He attended drawing lessons at the Normal Art School, Boston, MA, and art classes with W. A. G. Claus. From 1877 to 1880 he was apprenticed to a lithographic company in Boston. In 1879 Tarbell entered the School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, where he was a pupil of Otto Grundmann (1844-90), a former student of Baron Hendrik Leys in Antwerp.

In 1883 Tarbell left for Paris with his fellow student Frank W. Benson. Both Tarbell and Benson attended the Académie Julian, where they studied with Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefèbvre. They travelled to Italy in 1884 and to Italy, Belgium, Germany and Brittany the following year. Tarbell returned to Boston in 1886. Initially after his return, Tarbell made a living from magazine illustration, teaching privately and painting portraits. In 1889 Tarbell and Benson took Grundmann’s place at the Museum School. Tarbell was a popular teacher, whose prominence was so marked that his students were called ‘Tarbellites’. His teaching methods were traditional and academic: he required his pupils to render casts before they were allowed to paint. His motto was ‘Why not make it like?’, a query that shows his dedication to the model. He was professor at the School until 1912.

He had his first one-man show in 1891 in Boston. In 1893 he exhibited at the World Fair in Chicago. He had a big success at the World Fair in Paris in 1900. He was elected member of the National Academy in 1906. Between 1918 and 1926 he was director of the Corcoran School of Art in Washington.

The Sisters - A Study in June Sunlight

The group called The Ten American Painters was founded in 1898. To contemporaries, the group was quickly seen as the core of American Impressionism. It was created by Childe Hassam, John Twachtman and Julian Weir. The group included Willard Metcalf, Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, Joseph De Camp, Thomas Dewing, Edward Simmons and Robert Reid. William Chase joined the group in 1902 after the death of Twachtman. The interest of the group was in the annual public exhibition of work that shared an aesthetic thrust. The Ten survived for almost twenty years till it was dissolved in 1917.

1890s Impressionist art in Boston was primarily concerned with figure painting, and focused on society ladies in appropriate settings. Tarbell was one of the first to take this direction. His compositions of the 1890s, showing stylish ladies at leisure out of doors, adopted the entire colour spectrum of French Impressionism, and indeed occasionally enhanced it as in the glows to be seen in his subjects’ faces.