Edmund Charles Tarbell
Elizabeth Cabot wed the Harvard-educated physician Henry Lyman in December 1908. Within a year, the couple had moved to 36 Commonwealth Avenue in Boston’s Back Bay. Here, Tarbell renders Elizabeth surrounded by the evidence of her elite domestic identity. Dressed in virtuous white with a pink wrap, her hands are occupied with sewing. The interior’s elegant display of tasteful trappings was inspired by the Colonial Revival, a historicist phenomenon in which the skills and values ascribed to an earlier period were selectively packaged and presented as an antidote to the unsettling consequences of industrialization and its perceived threat to the nation’s culture. The artist’s fresh palette and loose brush blurs any suggestion of an ideological anachronism, making the Colonial Revival appear modern.
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P.S. A similar anti-industrial sentiment is seen in beautiful American landscapes by the Hudson River School artists. <3