Edmund Tarbell

Edmund Tarbell painted women in bright interiors with a quietness that owes a clear debt to Vermeer, and he was copied so widely by followers in Boston that critics coined the term Tarbellites. He taught at the Museum of Fine Arts school for over twenty years, which is how the style spread.

The early work is looser and more openly Impressionist, painted outdoors in New Hampshire with his family as models. The shift indoors came around 1900 and brought tighter drawing, controlled tonal ranges and careful attention to how daylight falls across a room.

He was a founding member of Ten American Painters, the group that broke from the Society of American Artists in 1897. Later portrait commissions, including several presidents, are competent rather than memorable. The domestic interiors are the reason to look.