No. 692 Edmund C. Tarbell
Edmund Tarbell lived at 24 Alban Street for much of his life in a house that belonged to his mother’s second husband. At fifteen, Edmund was put to work as an apprentice in the Forbes Lithographic Company of Boston. He enrolled in the school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, in 1879, and after graduation, he went to Paris with several of his classmates to study at Julian’s Academy with Louis Boulanger and Jule Joseph Lefebvre. He returned in 1888 and married Emeline Arnold Souther of Dorchester, members of whose family appear in some of Tarbell’s paintings. Edmund and Emeline lived at 24 Alban Street.
In 1889 he became an instructor at the Museum of Fine Arts, and in 1891 he held his first exhibition, in conjunction with his friend Frank Weston Benson, at the St. Botolph Club, Boston. Tarbell painted many portrait commissions as well as paintings of interiors with light filtering through gauzy curtains on young women occupied with domestic chores. He was the principal of the Corcoran School of Art, Washington, D.C., from 1918 to 1926. He retired to a property in New Castle, NH, where he had passed many summers.
No. 2740 In the Orchard, a painting of a Dorchester scene in the back yard of the Souther family home.
Sources:
Dictonary of American Biography
Docherty, Linda J., et. al., “Family Pictures: the Impressionist Art of Edmund C. Tarbell” in the magazine Antiques, November, 2001.
Pierce, Patricia Jobe. Edmund C. Tarbell and the Boston School of Painting (1889-1980). Hingham, MA, 1980.
Strickler, Susan. Impressionism transformed: the paintings of Edmund C. Tarbell. Manchester, NH : The Currier Gallery of Art, 2001.
Tucci, Douglas Shand. Ashmont: An Historical Guide to Peabody Square, Carruth’s Hill, and Ashmont Hill and the architecture … Dorchester: Dorchester Historical Society, 1991.