Painters throughout history have used family members as models, although usually in the service of a composition where they were painted to represent historical, literary or allegorical subjects. In the late 19th Century that changed as many painters, particularly the Impressionists and artists who were influenced by them, began to paint their immediate relatives in compositions meant to capture the immediacy of contemporary life.

Edmund Charles Tarbell, who is one of the most important of the painters classified as “American Impressionists”, was an enthusiastic participant in this approach. He often populated his canvasses, whether his sun-drenched plein air scenes or his magically serene interiors, with images of his wife, his wife’s sisters, his children and his grandchildren (image at top, My Three Granddaughters, 1937).

In addition to studying at the Boston Museum School, where he would eventually become an influential instructor, Tarbell studied in Paris at the Académie Julian. While in Paris he became exposed to both the revolutionary ideas of the French Impressionists and the great masters of classical art in the Louvre, and he represents one of the most fascinating points at which those two streams of artistic thought converge.

One of the nice things about writing a blog like lines and colors is that I never know when someone will write an email or post a comment about a piece I wrote some time ago. I wrote a post on Tarbell back in May of this year, in which I posted an image of Tarbell’s painting Mother and Mary, showing the artist’s wife and one of his daughters in his home in New Hampshire (left, above).

I was delighted to recently receive an email about the post from Louisa Severance, whose stepmother is one of Edmund Tarbell’s granddaughters. With her kind permission I’ve reprinted it here:

I am here with my stepmother Tarbell, who is Edmund Tarbell’s grandaughter. The painting on your blog page is Tarbell’s aunt at the desk, the artist’s daughter, [and] her grandmother, the artist’s wife. The living room looks just like this. One of the things that I think enhances the light is the reflection of the sunlight off the Piscataqua river which flows about 200 feet from the back of the house in Newcastle, New Hampshire. There was a wonderful exhibit in Nashua, NH several years ago which contained about 50% of his paintings. Check out the catalogue, the paintings are wonderful. Perhaps that is the same exhibit you are referring to.

The reason I am writing you is because I wanted to show “Tarbie” what was on the internet about her grandfather. She was astounded and thought he would be very pleased. I was interested to see he was referrenced in a blog and had to have a look. Tarbie appears in several paintings and is every bit as lovely now as she was beautiful then.

Somehow, the idea of one of Edmund Tarbell’s granddaughters checking out mention of her grandfather’s work in the web in 2006 strikes me as wonderfully cool.

The exhibit mentioned is the one I list in my previous post. There is a description of the exhibit here, along with a brief bio of Tarbell. The catalog of the exhibition, Impressionism Transformed: The Paintings of Edmund C. Tarbell, by Susan Strickler, Linda J. Docherty and Erica E. Hirshler is, as Louisa points out, a beautiful volume and makes a good introduction to the artist’s work. Another nice book is Edmund C. Tarbell: Poet of Domesticity by Laurene Buckley, You will also find Tarbell mentioned prominently in books about “The Ten American Painters”, the group of American Impressionists of which he was a founding member (see my post on Childe Hassam).

For those of you who are not familiar with Edmund Tarbell, I listed some sites and resources for Tarbell’s work on my previous post and I’ve rounded up more for this one. One of them, the Artcyclopedia page, lists museums in which you can see some of Tarbell’s works first hand, which I highly recommend if you get the chance.

And for those artists who are reading this, look around you. Perhaps the people in your immediate family have the potential to be among your best subjects, as they were for Edmund Tarbell.

Pennsylvania is a beautiful state. It’s lush and green in the summer, bursting with color in the fall and in winter reveals gracefully rolling hills and mountains laced with the traceries of stands of deciduous forest.

Eastern Pennsylvania in particular, in the areas along the Brandywine Creek and Delaware River, has inspired two schools of artists, both of which flowered around the turn of the 20th Century: the Brandywine School of great illustrators, including Howard Pyle and N.C. Wyeth, and the landscape painters working in Bucks County in and around a small town called New Hope, that was something of an artist’s colony.

These painters were generally called “Pennsylvania Impressionists”, a term museums and galleries like to apply to Pennsylvania artists who were influenced by the French Impressionists because the word “Impressionism” sells.

Notable among those painters is Daniel Garber. Perhaps you can call him an Impressionist, perhaps not.

The bright colors are there, as are the overt brushstrokes, the freshness and immediacy of images painted from life and the brilliant landscapes flooded with light and broken color; but like most American painters labeled “Impressionist”, I think he is… something else. I’m not sure I have a label for it, but “Impressionist” doesn’t tell the whole story.

Garber’s rolling Pennsylvania fields and verdant hills have an undercurrent of the Brandywine tradition, even if just from similarities in subject matter, but the overall effect and intent seem quite different from either that school or French Impressionism.

Occasionally his landscapes are bathed in light that seems so strong it’s as if the colors in the brightest areas were being bleached out, like an over exposed photograph. At times his canvasses seem to be broken up into planes of color, while still managing to be “realism” in some sense. Sort of like a collision between Cezanne and Alfred Sisley.

At other times, he can, indeed, look like an Impressionist, with sun dappled fields, wooded hills and reflective creeks exploded into a flurry of brilliant brushstrokes. Look again and you’ll find him painting like a realist, a very direct and painterly realist, but a realist nonetheless.

This becomes evident in Garber’s canvasses of interior scenes, in a vein somewhat similar to Edmund Tarbell, who also gets boxed and sold as an American “Impressionist”. Garber, again separating him from other painters usually placed in the same box, also established himself as a portrait artist.

Garber’s work is exceptionally beautiful, and if you live in the area, you’ll have a chance this Winter to see a major retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, where Garber studied and was eventually an instructor for 40 years.

The show is called Daniel Garber: Romantic Realist and runs from January 26 to April 8, 2007.

Garber’s work is often fairly large in scale, and the chance to stand in front of his canvasses and immerse yourself in his brilliant visions of Pennsylvania’s countryside is not to be missed.