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An Early
TARBELL
by NANCY CARLISLE Senior Curator of Collections
Waiting. Morning Effect. Venice, 1885. Oil on panel, 19 x 22¼ inches. Museum purchase.
School, and become founding members of The Ten, ten painters who seceded from the Society of American Artists in order to pursue a more modern impressionistic style of painting. Fellow members of The Ten Born in West Groton, Massachusetts, included John Henry Twachtman and raised in the Dorchester section (1853–1902), Childe Hassam (1859– of Boston, Edmund Charles Tarbell 1935), Julian Alden Weir (1852–1919), (1862–1938) turned an early aptitude Willard Metcalf (1858–1925), and for drawing into a successful career Thomas Dewing (1851–1938). and an enduring reputation. After While a student in Paris, a cholera studying at the Massachusetts Normal outbreak sent Tarbell out of the Art School [now Massachusetts city. After a brief trip to London he College of Art and Design, or headed to Munich in an attempt to MassArt], Tarbell apprenticed at the get into art school there. However, Forbes Lithographic Company before the Academy of Fine Arts, Munich, attending the School of the Museum was oversubscribed, so he and fellow of Fine Arts, Boston [Museum American artist Abbott Fuller Graves School], where he met fellow student (1859–1936) went to Venice. They Frank W. Benson (1862–1951). The two spent three months in a hotel on the would go on to train at the Académie Grand Canal with an extra room for Julian in Paris, teach at the Museum use as a studio. Surviving drawings
and paintings suggest that Tarbell spent much of his time exploring Venice and drawing its buildings as well as its people. The figure in the foreground of Waiting. Morning Effect. Venice is almost certainly the gondolier Tarbell describes in letters home as “a regular jewel,” seeming “to know just what you want. If you don’t tell him where to go, he just paddles up and down all the small canals where he thinks you would like to sketch. If he sees you looking at a place or talking about it, he stops and waits till you get through.” It may be the patient gondolier that the “waiting” in the painting’s title refers to. Although an early example of Tarbell’s work, the painting shows his skill at rendering the dark, rich colors of early morning and his mastery at conveying the water’s glassy surface. The painting, a recent purchase, is on view in the parlor of the Eustis Estate in Milton, Massachusetts.
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