Across the Room

Edmund Charles Tarbell

ca. 1899 · Oil on canvas · The American Wing

In Paris, Tarbell was deeply impressed by the fresh attitudes and revolutionary techniques of the Impressionists. Their preference for working out-of-doors, their high-keyed palette, and their loose, rapid brushwork became characteristics of his style. Tarbell also admired the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Vermeer, whose quiet, light-filled rooms with their timeless images of a solitary female occupant inspired many of his pictures. In this painting, a fashionably dressed recumbent young woman, silent and motionless, is seen across a wide, polished floor on which the half-light, filtering through a Venetian blind, creates a pattern of reflections. This would be a Dutch subject rendered in a French technique were it not for the flavor of innocently girlish and dreamy idleness that characterizes the pictures of several American painters at the end of the nineteenth century.

Artist

Edmund Charles Tarbell

Date

ca. 1899

Medium

Oil on canvas

Culture

American

Department

The American Wing

Credit line

Bequest of Miss Adelaide Milton de Groot (1876-1967), 1967