by Edmund C. Tarbell (1862–1938)
About the artist: Edmund C. Tarbell represented the so-called Boston school of impressionism and was a member of the group known as the Ten American Painters. When he showed In the Orchard at the 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago, Tarbell became the acknowledged leader of a national impressionist movement.
While Tarbell claimed that he was unaffected by the impressionist paintings he had seen while in Europe, In the Orchard is clearly indebted to a major work by the French impressionist artist Pierre-Auguste Renoir (1841–1919), Luncheon of the Boating Party of 1880–81.
About the painting: In the Orchard is Edmund C. Tarbell’s image of his wife, Emeline Souther Tarbell, her siblings, and a family friend conversing in a bucolic setting on a summer’s afternoon. The figures have been identified as the artist’s sister-in-law, Lydia, standing at left and shown again, seated and with her back to the viewer, on the right; Lemira Eastman, a family friend, in dark blue; Richmond Souther, leaning over the back of the red bench; and Emeline, wearing a black hat and looking directly at the viewer. Poses and glances tie the five together in an intimate, convivial circle in the beneficent dappled sunlight of the orchard, which stretches away to a white fence in the distance.
Tarbell painted the orchard landscape while in France in 1886, near the end of a two-year stay interrupted by a brief return to his native Boston to become engaged to Emeline. Following his final return from France, he painted the figures, posed in the backyard of the Souther family’s home in Dorchester, then a near suburb of Boston.
Sources:
[1] Image found on Conversations with the Collection, Terra Foundation for American Art
[2] Artist and painting descriptions
