Detail of Mother & Child in Boat by Edmund Charles Tarbell in the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, June 2010

Mother and Child in a Boat
1892
Edmund Charles Tarbell, American, 1862–1938

United States

Country of Origin, for Customs: United States

Dimensions: 76.52 x 88.9 cm (30 1/8 x 35 in.)

Material: Oil on canvas

Classification: Paintings

Accession Number: 23.532

On view in the Croll Gallery (Impressionism in Boston) - 227

Although Edmund Charles Tarbell had been exposed to Impressionism during his student days in Paris from 1884 to 1886, it was not until 1890 that he started painting in this progressive style. His conversion was no doubt influenced by the exhibition in 1890 of Sargent's "A Morning Walk" (private collection), the first of his Impressionist works to be shown in Boston. Tarbell painted "Mother and Child in a Boat" using his wife Emeline and daughter Josephine as models. He rendered ...the shimmer of light on the water and the dappled sunlight on the rowboat and costumes with strokes of pure color. Reluctant to relinquish his hard-earned drawing skills - his avowed purpose for studying in Paris - Tarbell carefully delineated his wife's hands and features and deftly foreshortened his daughter's left leg. The overhanging branches and high viewpoint, aspects borrowed from Japanese prints, provide an intimate view of these figures in a boat, a popular motif for both French and American Impressionists. Sargent had painted a strikingly similar composition, "Two Women Asleep in a Punt under the Willows" (Calouste Gulbenkian Museum, Lisbon), which Tarbell may have known through his friend Dennis Bunker, who worked with Sargent in 1888 and who had exhibited his own Impressionist landscapes alongside Sargent's. This text was adapted from an entry by Janet Comey in Erica Hirshler, "Impressionism Abroad: Boston and French Painting," exhibition catalogue, Royal Academy of Arts, 2005.

Text from: www.mfa.org/collections/object/mother-and-child-in-a-boat...