Beschreibung:

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 in 1892, creating a unique blend of genteel plein-air scenes of domesticity with portraiture and sporting art. Over the next several decades, his family would become an integral part of his oeuvre; they were interchangeably subjects proper and models for other equestrian scenes. His famous painting "Girl with Horse" (1892), exhibited in the World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago, features Emmeline (Emmie), his wife, as the dashing woman a la mode in the stripped dress. His son Edmund, Jr. and later grandson by the same name appear numerous times on horseback throughout the first quarter of the 20th century. In "Going for a Ride", the three younger Tarbell children serve as models, painted after a photograph with a young girl, presumably his youngest daughter, Mary, on horseback at the family's home in Newcastle, New Hampshire with the iconic white picket fence and snippet of the sea in the background. In the painting, Mercie, his second daughter, is added seated in the family doorway and Edmund, Jr. also appears on horseback. In 1911, Tarbell paints another portrait "My Children in the Woods" with horses. Between 1895-1896, Tarbell created several paintings and pastels of his eldest daughter Josephine (b. 1890), who would become one of his most prominent models into early adulthood before she married Robert White Ferrell. Josephine is depicted beside her mother "Josephine and Her Mother" (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 painted, "Josephine on Pony" (1895), but it is not pictured. This painting is also registered by the Smithsonian Art Inventory Catalog (also not pictured), but bearing the same measurements as the painting offered here. Where is it now? The last know location in 1980 was in the private collection of Mr. and Mrs. A. Cannon - the granddaughter of Josephine Tarbell. Mary Joseph Ferrell (1919-1998) married Dr. Albert Cannon (1921-2015) in 1943. The marriage later dissolved and Dr. Cannon remarried in 1991. According to museum and auction record archives, the Cannons gifted and/or sold works from their collection in the late 1970s and 1980s. Was this one of them? Are we indeed looking at "Josephine on Her Pony" with a similar white voile pleated cotton dress and small brown mare as seen in "Girl Grooming Her Horse"? The age, date and features of Josephine as a young child of five or six years are strikingly consistent with other period paintings of her and photographs conserved in the Papers of Edmund C. Tarbell at the Smithsonian. Most notable of all - the measurement - none of the other Tarbell paintings of children with horses are consistent with these.