34

Edmund Charles Tarbell

(American/Massachusetts, 1862-1938)

"[Probably] Josephine with Pony"

oil on canvas
signed lower left, "Vose Galleries of Boston" and "Frances Aronson Fine Art" labels en verso backing along with auction tags from "Christie's" and Skinner".
Framed.
30" x 25-1/2", framed 39" x 33-1/2"

  • Provenance: Vose Galleries, Boston, Massachusetts; Skinner, Boston, Massachusetts, September 24, 2010, lot 599; Frances Aronson Fine Art, Atlanta, Georgia.

    Notes: Edmund Tarbell, one of the most important American Impressionist painters and leading member of the Boston School of Art, began incorporating family members and horses in his paintings around 1892, creating a unique blend of genteel plein air scenes of domesticity with portraiture and sporting art. Over the next several decades, images of his family would become an integral part of his oeuvre; they were interchangeably subjects proper and models for equestrian scenes. One such painting was exhibited in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago: Girl with Horse featured his wife Emmeline as a dashing woman in a fashionable striped dress. In Going for a Ride, the three younger Tarbell children serve as models with the family home in Newcastle, New Hampshire as setting, the ocean and the iconic white picket fence in the background.

    Starting in 1895, Tarbell created several paintings and pastels of his eldest daughter, Josephine, who would become one of his most prominent muses before she married Robert White Ferrell. Josephine is depicted beside her mother in Josephine and Her Mother from 1896, and as the model for two other period works, a pastel and a painting, respectively titled Child and Horse and Child with Horse/Child Grooming Horse. In the catalogue raisonne compiled by Patricia Pierce in 1980, there was a third painting of Josephine with a horse titled Josephine on Pony, but it is not pictured. The same painting is also registered by the Smithsonian Art Inventory Catalog, though also not pictured, but bearing the same measurements as the painting offered here. However, it seemed its location was lost to time – the last known location in 1980 was in the private collection of Josephine Tarbell's granddaughter, Mrs. A. Cannon. According to museum and auction record archives, the Cannons gifted and sold works from their collection in the late 1970s and 1980s. Given the age, date, and features of the subject, [Probably] Josephine with Pony, offered here, is strikingly consistent with other period paintings of Josephine Tarbell. Could this painting, whose location was once unknown, have been rediscovered again?
  • Condition: **Previously professionally restored and relined. Signs of inpainting center (horse's head, body, and behind and the skirt of the girl's dress), area of inpainting upper left (sky), lower right (ground and hoof). Vertical surface mark upper left (sky).
    Ornate, modern gilt frame with surface marks, nicks, and abrasions along the edges.


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