The Breakfast Room

Tarbell received his early artistic training in his native Boston at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts before traveling to France. At Paris’s Académie Julian, Tarbell studied with the French Academicians Gustave Boulanger and J. J. Lefebvre while also being exposed to French Impressionism, a style he would begin to explore by 1891. Tarbell was a founding member of Ten American Painters, a group of Boston and New York artists who withdrew from the Society of American Artists and exhibited as an independent group until 1918. Included in the 1903 annual exhibition at the Pennsylvania Academy, "The Breakfast Room" exhibits Tarbell’s astute awareness of innovative Impressionist techniques in the play of sunlight, the use of pastel colors, and the cropping of pictorial elements at the edges of the composition. These elements led a contemporary critic to compare this painting to the work of Edgar Degas. Unlike Tarbell's typically less charged images, a palpable tension exists between the couple seated at the table. They seem to avoid looking at each other, as if in isolation, lost in their own thoughts. Framed by the open doorway, the servant in the background is further removed from their world. The painting of the nude on the back wall in this scene has been identified as a copy of Titian's "Venus and Dog with an Organist," ca. 1550 (Prado Museum, Madrid).