ON VIEW

Like his friend Frank Benson (q.v.), Edmund Tarbell is a major figure in the history of American Impressionism. Born in West Groton, Massachusetts, Tarbell declared his intent to become an artist at the age of ten. After a period of study with Horace Burdick (1844-1942), he enrolled in the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, where his teachers included Otto Grundmann (d. 1890) and Frederic Crowninshield (1845-1918). In 1884, Tarbell went to Europe to complete his training. Arriving in Paris, he enrolled in the Académie Julian and later traveled in Belgium, Germany, and Italy.

On his return to the United States, Tarbell took a teaching position at the Museum School. The decade of the 1890s saw the artist win a series of prestigious prizes for his brilliant figure paintings; however, some conservatives balked at the Impressionist influences in his work. In 1897 Tarbell helped to found the Ten, a group of established painters whose influence and progressive outlook facilitated the widespread acceptance of Impressionism in the United States. By the early years of the twentieth century, Tarbell was regarded among America's leading artists, a position he held even after the last showing of the Ten in 1918. Kept busy with teaching and numerous portrait commissions, Tarbell remained active until his death in 1938.

Family members appear often in Tarbell's work. Mercie Cutting Flowers depicts the artist's second daughter at the age of about seventeen; absorbed in trimming blossoms, she sits on the shaded porch of her family's summer home in New Castle, New Hampshire. Her proximity to the picture plane heightens the intimate quality of the scene, the private nature of which is reinforced by the fence and closed gate at the top of the canvas. Staccato strokes of light and shade lend the composition a buoyant air, yet the crisp contours and carefully blended flesh tones of the figure underscore the tangible presence of the subject.

As Linda Docherty has noted, much of Tarbell's success stemmed from his ability to utilize Impressionist techniques without sacrificing the realistic drawing and solid masses that American critics took to be the marks of good painting. In Mercie Cutting Flowers, if details of setting and costume have been broken down into colorful patterns of light drawn directly from French Impressionism, the head and arms of the figure reflect the formal rigor of the Museum School and the Académie Julian.

Additionally, Tarbell's subject was familiar and acceptable to his contemporaries. Images of young women engaged in introspective pastimes had been a staple of the Aesthetic movement beginning with James McNeill Whistler's figure paintings of the 1860s. Tarbell and other members of the Ten, notably Frank Benson, Joseph R. de Camp (1858-1923) and Thomas Wilmer Dewing (q.v.), further popularized the genre, keeping it vital well into the twentieth century. To a certain extent, it was images such as Mercie Cutting Flowers that led Robert Henri (q.v.) and his Ashcan School followers to rebel against the decorous and, to them, unreal painting styles that had come to dominate American art since the 1890s.

Shortly after it was completed, Mercie Cutting Flowers was sent to the Fourth Biennial Exhibition of Oil Paintings by Contemporary American Artists at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. Shown under the title, Portrait of a Young Lady, the canvas was characterized by one critic as "fresh and agreeable in color and is in every respect American. It has refinement and character."(1) Around this time, Tarbell gave the painting to his daughter, who presented it to Dr. Samuel Mixter by 1916, when it was again lent to the Corcoran Gallery of Art for a one-person show of Tarbell's work held early in that year. Mercie Cutting Flowers descended in the Mixter Family until it was acquired by the Currier Museum of Art in 1998.

VSD

NOTE

1. "Corcoran Exhibit," New York Evening Post, December 28, 1912. Clipping contained in object file, Currier Museum of Art.

REFERENCES

Laurene Buckley. Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity. New York: Hudson Hills Press, 2001.

Susan Strickler, with contributions by Linda J. Docherty and Erica E. Hirshler. Impressionism Transformed: The Paintings of Edmund C. Tarbell. Ex. cat. Currier Gallery of Art, 2001.