The American Style

When I was very young, I remember looking through framed prints with my mom at our local library. We found a beautiful one of three women and a baby, their dresses splashed by sunlight. We checked the print out and it hung in my room for several weeks. 

I remember looking at the dresses, the shadows, the sunlight, the jewel colors. It must have inspired something inside me, because I never forgot it, years and houses and towns later. Several years ago I began to talk about the painting with my mom. Neither one of us had seen it before or since: neither one of us knew the name of the artist, much less the painting. For now, it existed entirely in our minds.

So, we decided to try to find it. We narrowed it down to Impressionism fairly quickly due to its loose style and fresh colors; however, that did not narrow it down all that much. There are thousands of paintings by hundreds of Impressionists, at the very least. But I remembered that it had a certain spirit, something familiar. I thought that it might be American. After a search of American Impressionists, we found it: Three Sisters - A Study in June Sunlight (1890) by Edmund Charles Tarbell (1862-1938). It was like seeing an old friend again.

Edmund Charles Tarbell, Three Sisters - A Study in June Sunlight (1890) (Milwaukee Art Museum)

When I was in college studying Art History, I wrote a paper on Tarbell and his distinctly American style. I summed up my paper with this:

Accomplishing the rare feat of successfully combining tradition with innovation, Tarbell’s rendition of Impressionism was distinctly American, not only due to the values it espoused, but also in the disparate range of its inspiration. As a result of an amalgamation of influences, Tarbell developed an American style, pleasingly unaffected in the consistent quality of its translucent beauty.

I don’t doubt that the presence of Tarbell’s painting in my room as a child made me more aware of art and its history. I’m really thankful for coming across it, and continually thankful to my mom for introducing me to art and literature.

Although Tarbell’s painting is loose and airy, it is composed. I used the diamond pattern on the blue and white dress to establish an underlying structure, then casually filled in certain areas with tangled flowers and foliage, leaving other spaces blank to represent the sunlight and white dresses.