Se préparant pour la matinée

A young woman, Charlotte Barton of Boston, pins her hat in a gilded mirror before heading out to an afternoon show. Tarbell painted her in 1907, and he was the leading figure of what people called the Boston School, American painters devoted to well-off women in calm, sunlit rooms. Their real master was two centuries dead. Look at the upper right and you can find a corner of a Vermeer, The Music Lesson, hung on the wall, a quiet nod to the Dutch painter whose light and stillness they were all chasing. Tarbell had a settee and this mirror carted from his Boston studio up to New Hampshire so he could set the scene exactly as he wanted.