Edmund Charles Tarbell
Edmund Charles Tarbell (April 26, 1862 - August
1, 1938) was an American Impressionist painter. He was a member
of the Ten American Painters.
Edmund Charles TarbellTarbell was born at West Groton, Massachusetts
to a family which immigrated from England in 1647. His father, Edmund
Whitney Tarbell, died in 1863 after contracting typhoid fever while
serving in the Civil War. His mother, Mary Sophia Fernald, thereupon
remarried to David Frank Hartford and moved with him to Milwaukee,
Wisconsin, leaving young "Ned" and his sister, Nellie
Sophia, to be raised by their paternal grandparents in Groton.
As a youth, Tarbell took evening art lessons from
George H. Bartlett at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. Between
1877 and 1880, he apprenticed at the Forbes Lithographic Company
in Boston. In 1879 he entered the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston, studying under Otto Grundmann. Matriculating in the same
class were two other future members of the Ten American Painters,
Robert Reid and Frank Weston Benson.
Because of his talent, Tarbell was encouraged to
continue his education in Paris, France, then epicenter of the art
world. Consequently, in 1883 he entered the Academie Julian to study
under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. Paris exposed
him to an academic training, which invariably included copying Old
Master paintings at the Louvre Museum, but also to the Impressionism
movement then sweeping the city's galleries. That duality would
imprint his work. In 1884 Tarbell's education included a Grand Tour
to Italy, and then again the following year to Italy, Belgium, Germany
and Brittany.
In the Orchard, 1891Tarbell returned to Boston in 1886, earning
a living as an illustrator, private art instructor and portrait
painter. He married Emeline Souther, member of a prominent Dorchester,
Massachusetts family, in 1888. In 1889, Tarbell assumed the position
of his former mentor, Otto Grundmann, at the School of the Museum
of Fine Arts, Boston, where he was a popular teacher. He gave his
pupils a solid academic art training -- before they learned to paint,
they had to render from plaster casts of classical statues. So pervasive
was his influence on Boston painting that his followers were dubbed
"The Tarbellites." In 1919, Tarbell became principal of
the art school at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, DC.
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