"Bringing the Museum to You"

The Cyber Art Show continues our study of Realism and Impressionist landscape painters in the Public Domain with a ten-piece Exhibition of works by American painter Edmund Tarbell (1862-1938). He was born in the Asa Tarbell House in West Groton, Massachusetts. His father, Edmund Whitney Tarbell, died in 1863 after contracting typhoid fever while serving in the Civil War. 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. He matriculated in the same class with Robert Reid and Frank Weston Benson, two other future members of  "The Ten" American Painters.

 

In 1883 Edmund entered the Académie Julian in Paris to study under Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre. There he received rigorous academic training, copying Old Master paintings at the Louvre Museum. The French Impressionist movement was then sweeping the city's galleries, and this informed Tarbell’s work. In 1884, Tarbell increased the scope of his formal training, studying in Italy, Belgium, Germany and

Brittany.

 

Tarbell returned to Boston in 1886, where he began his career as an illustrator, private art instructor and portrait painter. In 1913, with financial backing from Lilla Cabot Perry, he helped found The Guild of Boston Artists, a society which fostered art and artists in the city. The Guild opened in 1914 and Tarbell was its first president, serving through 1924.

 

In 1918, Tarbell was hired as principal of the art school at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, a position he held until 1926. He was also appointed Chairman of the Advisory Council for the Museum of Fine Arts.  

 

Tarbell's work hangs in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Gallery of Art, Smithsonian American Art Museum, Corcoran Gallery, DeYoung Museum, National Academy of Design, New Britain Museum of American Art, Worcester Art Museum, and numerous other collections.