Edmund Charles Tarbell

Around 1900 Edmund Tarbell began painting rooms. A woman reading by a window, another at a table with the light lying flat across a bare floor, the household hush of well-off Boston at the turn of the century. He had learned Impressionism in France, its broken light and outdoor colour, and then he carried it indoors.

What he found there was Vermeer. Tarbell openly admired the 17th-century Dutch painter of quiet interiors, and he studied how Vermeer had built calm out of daylight, a single figure and a few objects. His own interiors have that same measured stillness, dressed in modern clothes.

Tarbell was the anchor of what came to be called the Boston School, and he taught for decades at the city's museum school. His interior pictures were copied so widely by his students and admirers that a critic nicknamed the whole following the Tarbellites. In the late 1890s he had also been a founding member of The Ten, a group of American Impressionists who broke away from the older exhibiting societies.