The Museum recently installed an important painting by Edmund Charles Tarbell in its American decorative arts gallery. Arrangement in Pink and Gray (Afternoon Tea) was one of the artist’s most celebrated works, winning the Hallgarten Prize from the National Academy of Design in 1894, and the Temple Gold Medal from the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1895.
Arrangement in Pink and Gray illustrates Tarbell’s preference for a limited palette of soft, muted colors. He greatly admired the paintings of James McNeill Whistler, who often titled his works as though they were musical compositions—calling them arrangements, nocturnes, symphonies—to draw attention to their harmonies of color and tone. (His Arrangement in Black and Brown: The Fur Jacket, also in this gallery, is one such example.) Tarbell quite pointedly adopted these color concerns in his Arrangement in Pink and Gray, even borrowing Whistler’s titling strategy to highlight his aesthetic influence.
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- Elizabeth Athens, Assistant Curator of American Art
