Tarbell was, like Edgar Degas and John Singer Sargent, essentially an academic painter who adopted the free brushstrokes of the Impressionists.  The bold surface treatment of the canvas was imposed on a strict draftsmanship that emphasized stereometric values, which had been crucial to Victorian academic painters engaged in a complicated conversation with photography.

This very distinct movement in painting has been generally overlooked in the schematic oversimplifications of art history, which wants to assign artists to crude categories in a narrative which sees academic painting supplanted by Impressionism supplanted by Expressionism.  It’s a narrative that only exists in books and in the minds of museum curators.