Across the Room

A leading figure in the so-called Boston School, Tarbell was deeply influenced by the French Impressionists. He also admired the seventeenth-century Dutch painter Jan Vermeer, whose light-filled interiors with women in quiet activities inspired many of his pictures. In this inventive composition, a fashionably dressed, recumbent young woman—seemingly modern in her direct engagement—is seen across an unusually wide floor on which the half-light, filtering through a Venetian blind, creates a luminous pattern of reflections. The painting was one of two by Tarbell exhibited at the Paris Exposition, where he was awarded a bronze medal.