8/10/2006 9:33:50 AM
Tarbell’s Three Sisters live with them
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But as the 20th century wore on and Paris receded, it became clear that Benson and Tarbell hadn’t caught James’s “Europe virus.” Neither artist left America again. Benson’s Two Little Girls (1903), a portrait of his nieces Rosamund and Ruth Benson, is as penetrating — and unsettling — as John Singer Sargent’s Miss Helen Sears (1895), and Rainy Day (1906), Elizabeth curled up in a rattan chair, is an all-American version of Across the Room, but thereafter he retreated into gauzy family scenes like Portrait of My Daughters (1909) and Sunshine and Shadow (1911), bucolic idylls for an increasingly industrial America. After On Bos’n’s Hill (1901) — Emeline à la Benson, willowy in white muslin with picture hat and parasol — Tarbell went the more Puritan route with wholesome scenes of domestic harmony: Josephine and Mercie (1908), My Children in the Woods (1911), My Family (1914), Mother, Mercie, and Mary (1918), Mother and Mary (1922).
Both Benson and Tarbell had claimed as their property French Impressionism’s freer brush strokes and love affair with light. What eluded them was the openness that James expressed through Milly Theale: “She had never, she might well believe, been in such a state of vibration; her sensibility was almost too sharp for her comfort. . . . ” That sensibility was too sharp for them: Benson took refuge in idealized womanhood, Tarbell in old-fashioned family values. Still, only Sargent did better, and he was hardly an Impressionist. And in the first decade of the 20th century, Benson and Tarbell gave the art world its first American girls of summer.
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