Josephine and Mercie

Edmund Tarbelll, acclaimed in the early years of the twentieth century as "the poet of domesticity," established his reputation as a painter of well-bred young women in sunlit gardens and tastefully appointed interiors. Along with Frank Benson, Joseph DeCamp, William Paxton, and other painters of the Boston School, Tarbell synthesized a wide range of cosmopolitan stylistic influences in representing the contemporary world of the elite New England culture he knew best. _Josephine and Mercie_, which depicts two of the artist's daughters in a sitting room of the family's summer home in New Castle, New Hampshire, was immediately praised for its "perfect rendering of values" and for "discover[ing] in familiar surroundings elements of genuine beauty."

In the years after the Civil War, New England in general and Massachusetts in particular experienced rapid social, economic, and political change that destabilized traditional hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity. As the **New York Times** would explain in 1917, "Interiors by Mr. Tarbell should be prized by Americans for their truthful interpretation of a singularly distinct phase of American life that can hardly survive the influences of the present century."

Tarbell was deeply rooted in the New England culture represented in his art. His ancestors had lived in Massachusetts since 1638 and he grew up and received his early artistic training in Boston. He purchased his house at New Castle, a coastal village that had once been the colonial government seat, in 1905, and immediately set about making it into the "ideal home." Enlisting his wife and children as models, Tarbell deployed the interior spaces of the house as a surrogate studio in which his family members are as artfully arranged as the furniture. Absorbed in reading and writing and dressed in white, Tarbell's daughters are perfect embodiments of the American Girl—wholesome, healthy, and literate. Their dresses, which visually rhyme with the ruffled curtains, establish a close relationship between the interior setting and the figures: the Colonial Revival interior and the girls both suggest innocence and continuity with an idealized New England Past.