The School’s First Artistic Collaboration: Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson
The value of artistic community is a key pillar of SMFA–and it has been from the beginning. Frank Weston Benson (1862-1951) and Edmund C. Tarbell (1862-1938) were arguably the school’s first dynamic duo, shaping the way that painting and drawing were taught and for what purpose in the early days, while also sharing a studio for decades and building their own successful art practices.
Tarbell grew up in Boston, taking an evening drawing class at the Massachusetts Normal School, then at age fifteen, an apprenticeship at a local lithography studio. He cast lithography aside to study at the School of Drawing and Painting (later renamed SMFA) for three years. It was there that he met Benson, the man who would become not only his closest friend, but also his closest collaborator.
Benson was born in Salem, Massachusetts, and came to the School of Drawing and Painting right out of high school. Together, the friends journeyed to Paris, where they studied at the elite Academie Julien, where legend has it, Gustave Boulanger, a prominent artist and teacher, gave Benson a palm-reader-like prophecy: “You have your career in your hands…you will become very great.”
Benson and Tarbell were deeply inspired by the light-filled Impressionism of their era, which, though sometimes considered conventional by today’s standards, was regarded as countercultural then. They returned to Boston in 1888 and opened a studio together, earning prestigious art exhibition prizes and becoming local celebrity artists.
They were first hired by SMFA as assistants to its inaugural director, Otto Grundmann, but when Grundmann retired in 1890, they took on his course load, at first on a temporary basis, but eventually as faculty of the practice. They split up the drawing and painting instruction, with Benson chairing the painting department and Tarbell chairing drawing.
In her 1983 graduate thesis about the school’s history (now part of the SMFA Library archives), scholar Roberta Shaheen explained, with “their positions secured, Tarbell and Benson literally and figuratively began pushing to expand the school.” The pair were known for being fiery, clever, and insistent–successfully persuading administration to make both big and small changes from adding advanced classes in life painting, to championing students’ petitions for composition classes with live nude models.
Racking up exclusive artistic prizes of their day and serving as jury members of the prestigious Louisiana Purchase Exhibition in St. Louis (where the school won the grand prize) gave this duo even more clout and boosted student enrollment numbers. Emboldened, they became outspoken in their views of the school’s strategic direction, famously resigning in a 1912 walkout over a dispute regarding the competency of its newest leadership who were leaders in design, but not the fine arts. Although history may never reveal the precise details, it’s reported that Tarbell and Benson felt threatened and perceived that the administration was telling them how to teach.
They believed in the traditional “master-disciple" style of teaching, which was inherently hierarchical and followed a strictly prescribed order of rigorous skill-building, but left little room for students’ individual self-expression and no invitations for adventures across mediums and departments.
Although SMFA has changed its philosophy entirely in recent decades–and now champions an interdisciplinary approach–the contributions that Tarbell and Benson made to school are lasting.
They believed strongly in turning out qualified, professional artists from the school and will also always have the honor of being known as the school’s first collaborators and lifelong friends.
Image:
Ten American Painters (The Ten), 1908, by Haeseler Photographic Studios, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Courtesy of the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Photograph Archives, Washington, D. C.
- Seated, left to right: Edward Simmons, Willard L. Metcalf, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, Robert Reid
- Standing, left to right: William Merritt Chase, Frank W. Benson, Edmund C. Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp
