Near Vermeer: Edmund C. Tarbell’s and John Sloan’s Dutch Pictures

This article considers drawings and paintings made by the American artists Edmund Tarbell and John Sloan in relation to the art of the seventeenth-century Dutch Republic. Claims about, interpretations of, and enthusiasm for “Dutch Pictures” were prominent features of the transatlantic artworld in the years around 1900. Art critics, including George Moore, Charles Caffin, James Gibbons Huneker and Frank Jewett Mather, discussed the relationship between historical Dutch painting and contemporary art, while American collectors and museums were purchased and displayed large numbers of paintings by Rembrandt, Hals, Vermeer and their contemporaries. The article connects specific ideas and objects to paintings such as Tarbell’s New England Interior (1906) and Sloan’s Scrubwomen, Astor Library (1910-11), and thinks more broadly about modern art’s relationship to nationalism and to the past.