FAMILY PICTURES: THE IMPRESSIONIST ART OF EDMUND C.TARBEL.

Painters have always used family members as models, but with the rise of impressionism in the late nineteenth century this practice became part of a larger project to interpret modem life. Charles Baudelaire's declaration that eternal beauty could be discovered in "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent" [1] served as a rallying cry for artists on both sides of the Atlantic who had felt constrained by the traditional academic hierarchy of subject matter. Proponents of the so-called new painting abandoned religious, historical, and literary subjects and focused their attention on the world of personal experience. They found in familiar people, places, and patterns of ...