Edmund Charles Tarbell was one of the most influential artists of the 19^th and early 20^th centuries because he championed impressionism while maintaining a respect for academic traditions and he “fathered” what is known as The Boston School of Painting by virtue of having 100s of followers who appreciated and tried to imitate his spontaneous brush and refined genteel subject matter. After training in Boston and at the Academie Julian in Paris, Tarbell and Frank W. Benson began their teaching careers at Boston’s Museum School in 1890 and by 1912 Tarbell’s influence both as a painter and teacher was international. His devotees including William Paxton, Joseph DeCamp, Frank W. Benson, Philip Leslie Hale, Lilian Westcott Hale, Marguerite S. Pearson, William and Lee L. Kaula, and hundreds of others were dubbed Tarbellites. 

Tarbell was elected an Associate and then a National Academician at the National Academy of Design in NYC, but in 1898 he left the Academy with Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Benson and others to exhibit independently away from juries with The Ten American Painters. Because of the fame and artistic perfection of the members of The Ten, they quickly became the most sought after group of American painters in the world and each man’s reputation and financial position prospered.

After Tarbell had headed the Museum of Fine Arts School in Boston from 1889-1912, he and Benson resigned as the School’s directors and Tarbell accepted a position as the Director of the Corcoran Gallery School in Washington, D.C., to which many of his Boston students followed.

Tarbell won numerous gold medals, was a juror for U.S. and international exhibitions and was renowned for his exquisite renderings in portraits, interiors and plein aire landscapes. When Modernism became the rage, art critics and the public alike sought to collect outdoor paintings by Tarbell, despite the fact he painted less than 20 of them. Portrait commissions drained his time. Today, out of approximately 455 known paintings executed by the artist, 90% of his plein aire canvases are in museum collections.

After Tarbell married Emeline Souther of Plymouth, MA on November 7, 1888, the couple often visited Tarbell’s in-laws in that coastal town, where Tarbell painted during summers until 1910. Having painted primarily portraits of U.S. presidents, dignitaries, war heroes and the rich and famous or canvases depicting people in interiors that show the Brahmin society doing daily chores, Tarbell had little time to paint outdoors, but when he did paint landscapes directly on location the brushwork was fluent, confident, somewhat hurried and always impressionistic. Critics rank his outdoor subjects as his most French in feeling and character and his pencil drawings as some of the finest in American 19^th century art.  

The artist died in New Castle, N.H. in 1938 a world-famous American impressionist. In that year, the Museum of Fine Arts gave Tarbell and Frank W. Benson a two-man retrospective, but Tarbell did not live to see the exhibition. Patricia Jobe Pierce’s Edmund C. Tarbell & the Boston School of Painting was the first book printed on Tarbell (1980).

References: Pierce, Edmund C. Tarbell & the Boston School of Painting (1980); Who’s Who in American Art (volumes beginning in 1890-1938); Pierce, The Ten (1976); Spanierman, The Ten (1990). Tarbell is well listed in every leading art reference on American art and artists.