+ Expand

Description: Portrait of Mrs. C. (Mrs. H.M. Channing) signed and dated 'Tarbell 1911' (lower right) oil on canvas 401/4 x 43 in. (102.2 x 109.2 cm.) PROVENANCE Lawrence Minot. Henry M. Channing. LITERATURE Boston Evening Transcript, March 23, 1911, p. 3 Trask, American Magazine of Art, 1918, p. 219, illustrated Boston Post, "How a Noted Boston Artist Works and Lives", circa 1912, illustrated P.J. Pierce, Edmund Tarbell and the Boston School of Painting: 1889-1980, Hingham, Massachusetts, 1980, p. 188 EXHIBITION Boston, Massachusetts, Boston Art Club, January 20-February 10, 1912, no. 41 Boston, Massachusetts, Copley Society, 1912, no. 6 Washington, D.C., Corcoran Gallery of Art, January 22-February 13, 1916, no. 29 New York, M. Knoedler & Co., February 25-March 9, 1918, no. 2 Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Benson and Tarbell, 1938, no. 125 Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, 18th Annual Exhibition NOTES With its subtle sense of interior light as well as its refined brushwork, Portrait of Mrs. C. exhibits Edmund Tarbell's preeminence in executing understated depictions of women in interiors. Tarbell saw the essence of beauty in the women he painted. Specializing in such elegant and refined compositions, Tarbell was recognized as the leader of the Boston figural Impressionists. As a number of young artists returned to Massachusetts after traveling in the French countryside at Giverny, a new school of Impressionist landscape painters including Frank Weston Benson and Tarbell adopted the Impressionist style, creating figural works that surpassed their landscape counterparts in influence and significance. Like his colleague William McGregor Paxton, Tarbell was seen as a painter whose style and intentions followed in the tradition of the great Dutch painter Jan Vermeer. Each artist loved the different qualities of light. The artist and critic Kenyon Cox wrote of Tarbell, "To be exquisite in choice and infinitely elegant in arrangement, balancing space against space and tone against tone with utmost nicety; to accept the forms of nature as they are, yet to invest them with a nameless charm while seeming only to copy them accurately; to colour soberly yet subtly, giving each light and half-tone, each shadow and reflection its proper hue as well as its proper value; to represent... the atmosphere that bathes [objects] and the light that falls upon them, yet with no sacrifice of the solidity of the character of the objects themselves; to achieve what shall seem a transcript of natural fact yet shall be in reality a work of the finest art. No one since Vermeer himself has made a flat wall so interesting -- has so perfectly rendered its surface, its exact distance behind the figure, the play of light upon it and the amount of air in front of it." (K. Cox, "The Recent Work of Edmund Tarbell" Burlington Magazine, vol. 14, January, 1909, p. 259) Portraits of women were among Tarbell's most successful works. Trevor Fairbrother has written, "A mainstay of the Boston School was the female portrait, which typically presents the sitter against a quiet background while strongly suggesting that she is both stylish and intelligent, elegant and accomplished...It is consistent with the tradition of John Singleton Copley, whose eighteenth-century female sitters were dignified, thoughtful, and expensively dressed, but rarely ostentatious." ( The Bostonians: Painters of an Elegant Age, 1870-1930, Boston, Massachusetts, 1986, p.66) After returning from their travels in the French countryside, Tarbell and Frank Benson became the Directors of the Department of Paintings and Drawings at the Museum School at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. Tarbell was a revered teacher as well as a successful painter. By 1913, Tarbell resigned from the museum school and had become a well-known member and founder of the now famous group, "The Ten". Frank W. Benson, Robert Reid, Joseph DeCamp, Childe Hassam, Willard Metcalf, Edward Simmons, J. Alden Weir, John H. Twachtman and Thomas Dewing made up the group of Bostonian painters. "The Ten" exhibited only their finest paintings and drawings and within a decade became the most sought-after painters in America. Portrait of Mrs. C. (Mrs. H.M. Channing) by Edmund Tarbell embodies the timeless beauty these artists sought to create. This spectacular example of Tarbell's portraits, is one of his most glorious.