American Art Collaborative

Edmund Tarbell was an American Impressionist known for his mastery of interior subjects and luminous effects. This painting shows the artist’s wife and adult daughters in the family’s handsome, tranquil home in New Castle, New Hampshire. Yet embedded in this domestic scene are signs of change. In the summer of 1918 Tarbell’s wife Emeline, absorbed in a newspaper, could have been reading of progress towards an Allied victory in World War I or the campaign for women’s suffrage. The bag that hangs on an empty chair suggests a departure. Tarbell had recently been named principal of the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D.C., and Mercie, who gazes at the painter, had married. Placed prominently at the center of the composition, a bowl of open peonies stands as a reminder of transience.