This lady, concentrating on adjusting her hat with a pearl-tipped hatpin, is typical of Edmund Tarbell's refined, everyday subjects. Like Frank Benson, Tarbell belonged to the Boston School, which flourished during the early decades of the 20th century. These painters were renowned for their pictures of young women engaged in sedentary and often solitary domestic activities, or posed in sunlit outdoor settings. In his interior compositions, Tarbell concentrated upon the insular world of upper-class women, depicting them in an austere but elegant manner, attired in the latest fashions.
The passages of loose, energetic brushwork in her blouse and hair display the spontaneity that Tarbell brought to his outdoor Impressionist paintings. Artists of the Boston School explored aspects of texture, which can be seen in the handling of the creases in the woman's blouse and the feathers on her hat. Tarbell's expert drawing technique is evident in the rendering of the sitter's arm and the handling of her facial features. Like many painters of the Boston School, Tarbell was influenced by the paintings of the 17th-century Dutch artist Jan Vermeer, whose works were rediscovered in the mid-19th century. In fact, a corner of one of Vermeer's paintings appears at the upper right of Tarbell's elegant interior as a tribute to this Dutch master.
[Boston School artists] are more interested in the rendering of beauty than of fact.
-Artist and critic Guy Pène Du Bois, 1915
