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Lot Essay
With its subtle sense of interior light and gestural brushwork, Portrait of Mrs. George Putnam and Her Daughters exhibits Edmund Tarbell's pre-eminence in executing understated depictions of women in interiors. Tarbell saw the essence of beauty in the women he painted. He specialized in elegant and refined compositions and was recognized as the leader of the Boston figural Impressionists. As a number of young American 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 enjoyed depicting the variants of light and shadow in their works. In 1909, 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)
The present painting, Portrait of Mrs. George Putnam and her Daughters, illustrates Tarbell's accomplished hand at depicting females within interiors, as well as that of formal portraiture. Although an unfinished work, the essence of the composition is clear in its depiction of three regal women, at different stages of life, all seemingly content and comfortable in their surroundings. Their femininity is further enhanced by Tarbell's use of cascading light issuing in from the right, highlighting their faces and lacey white gowns, framed against the neo-classical fortitude of their interior setting. Mary Tarbell Schaffer, the artist's daughter, recollects "seeing this portrait in her father's studio at the Fenway Studios in Boston. She remembered that the painting remained unfinished because one of the children became ill, and when she recovered, her mother took them both to Europe for a year." (I.S. Fort and M. Quick, American Art: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, 1991, p. 233) Mr. George Putnam was an Episcopal bishop residing in Lenox, Massachusetts at the turn of the century.
Portraits of women were among Tarbell's most successful works. The 1890s were years of great experimentation for the artist, both in subject matter and style. He excelled at depictions of women in the outdoors, bathed in sunlight, often using his family members as models. By 1905, Tarbell was firmly ensconced in his Impressionist technique and equally accepted and hailed by critics across the nation for his interior depictions of women. Buckley notes, "Throughout his years of experimentation, Tarbell's 'bread and butter' works were his costume portraits, and these, while increasingly tonal, were nevertheless executed in the painterly style of Impressionism. Praised by the critics, awarded prize after prize by jurors--these works became his signature pieces."
Critics accepted and praised Tarbell's ladies with the utmost graciousness and readiness. Contemporaneous virtues were seen in these works, most importantly in their presence as truly American scenes and "more importantly, New England ones, with their neo-colonial furnishings and neo-puritanical austerity of tone. The need to capture 'contemporaneous life to give to future generations an abiding idea of the ways and manners of certain sections of this country in this year of our Lord" was deemed important to critics from the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser. (L. Buckley, Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity, New York, 2001, p. 97) Portrait of Mrs. George Putnam and Her Daughters embodies the timeless beauty Tarbell sought to create in his depiction of an image of femininity, domestic happiness and maternal caring and bond between a mother and her daughters.
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 enjoyed depicting the variants of light and shadow in their works. In 1909, 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)
The present painting, Portrait of Mrs. George Putnam and her Daughters, illustrates Tarbell's accomplished hand at depicting females within interiors, as well as that of formal portraiture. Although an unfinished work, the essence of the composition is clear in its depiction of three regal women, at different stages of life, all seemingly content and comfortable in their surroundings. Their femininity is further enhanced by Tarbell's use of cascading light issuing in from the right, highlighting their faces and lacey white gowns, framed against the neo-classical fortitude of their interior setting. Mary Tarbell Schaffer, the artist's daughter, recollects "seeing this portrait in her father's studio at the Fenway Studios in Boston. She remembered that the painting remained unfinished because one of the children became ill, and when she recovered, her mother took them both to Europe for a year." (I.S. Fort and M. Quick, American Art: A Catalogue of the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Los Angeles, California, 1991, p. 233) Mr. George Putnam was an Episcopal bishop residing in Lenox, Massachusetts at the turn of the century.
Portraits of women were among Tarbell's most successful works. The 1890s were years of great experimentation for the artist, both in subject matter and style. He excelled at depictions of women in the outdoors, bathed in sunlight, often using his family members as models. By 1905, Tarbell was firmly ensconced in his Impressionist technique and equally accepted and hailed by critics across the nation for his interior depictions of women. Buckley notes, "Throughout his years of experimentation, Tarbell's 'bread and butter' works were his costume portraits, and these, while increasingly tonal, were nevertheless executed in the painterly style of Impressionism. Praised by the critics, awarded prize after prize by jurors--these works became his signature pieces."
Critics accepted and praised Tarbell's ladies with the utmost graciousness and readiness. Contemporaneous virtues were seen in these works, most importantly in their presence as truly American scenes and "more importantly, New England ones, with their neo-colonial furnishings and neo-puritanical austerity of tone. The need to capture 'contemporaneous life to give to future generations an abiding idea of the ways and manners of certain sections of this country in this year of our Lord" was deemed important to critics from the New York Globe and Commercial Advertiser. (L. Buckley, Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity, New York, 2001, p. 97) Portrait of Mrs. George Putnam and Her Daughters embodies the timeless beauty Tarbell sought to create in his depiction of an image of femininity, domestic happiness and maternal caring and bond between a mother and her daughters.