This Edmund Tarbell guy was so popular in his time that a group of fellow artists willingly called themselves the “Tarbellites.”

Sound a little cultish? Well people were really into him. For example, he threw a hissy fit and quit his job at the Boston School of the Museum of Fine Arts because he didn’t like his new boss (welcome to the workforce, dude) and they still hired him back a few years later.

I’m not saying Tarbell was a self-serving art cult leader who prayed to a God made of American antique furniture (he loved the stuff), I’m just saying that he was an expert at convincing people of his greatness. After leaving the School of the Museum fellow artists gave him money to form the Guild of Boston Artists to which he would be president for ten years. Additionally, in 1877 when he and a bunch of friends (artists, lackeys, followers, whatever) felt that the National Academy of Design was too uptight for their liberal artistic endeavors, they branched off to form their own Society of American Artists.

Some years later, Tarbell and his buddies felt yet again that their artistic geniuses were being stifled by all the mediocre plebeian commercial Classicists surrounding them.They broke off to form an even more exclusive club which they called “The Ten.” Obviously the ten artists who founded the club were the best ten artists in the area (state? Country? WORLD?! UNIVERSE?!?) and they would ride from town to town on their high horses doing their own curating and promotional work, because one just couldn’t find good help in those days.

While fellow artists adored Tarbell’s apparently otherworldly blend of Edgar Degas and Johannes Vermeer influences, not everyone worshipped his holier-than-thou talent. One critic wrote that upon leaving a Tarbellites exhibition, “All one remembers is clever brushwork and paint, and beneath the canvas nothing to satisfy one’s soul.”  I bet that guy died in a mysteriously fatal Colonial rocking chair collapse.