November 2, 11:30 AM
(Boutwell House open 11-2)
Gov. George S. Boutwell House, 172 Main Street, Groton

Join the Groton History Centery in welcoming award-winning portraitist and still life artist Mary Minifie to speak about Edmund Tarbell’s career and legacy.

Only an artist can explore the poetry, imagination, and keenness of perception that goes into creating a work of lasting beauty and emotional resonance. Award-winning Groton artist Mary Minifie brings her rigorous artistic background, sensibility, and appreciation to her talk, “Edmund Tarbell: The Poetry of Painting,” at the Groton History Center’s Boutwell House on Saturday, November 2.

Minifie’s multi-media presentation on “what a painter thinks about when he’s composing and making a painting,” will start at 11:30 am, during the History Center’s Open House (running from 11 am to 2 pm that day). She will draw on the unique gathering of Edmund Tarbell’s artwork currently on display at the Boutwell House thanks to the Tarbell Charitable Trust, as well as allowing viewers a glimpse into the process behind one of her own exquisite portraits.

Influenced by Edward Manet and others, the Impressionists broke with the academic past to discover “the amazing, magical properties,” as Minifie puts it, of natural light. Along with fellow students William Paxton, Frank Benson and others, Groton native Edmund C. Tarbell brought his classical training in drawing and painting at Académie Julian in Paris to his engagement with this new way of seeing. Mary Minifie brings to her portraits, still lives, and figurative work a similar legacy. She studied under portrait painter Paul Ingbretson, a modern master who received his training from Ives Gammel, a student of Paxton’s, who was, like Tarbell, a member of the famed Boston School of Painters.

Universal access available to the first floor (where the exhibition is on display) and grounds.

Mary Minifie was educated at Wellesley College and earned an M.F.A. from Boston University School of Fine Arts. For the next ten years she lived and worked abroad in Cairo, Egypt, Oxford, England, and Vienna, Austria, exhibiting widely. In 1985 when she returned to the U.S., she began her study of portrait and the figure with portrait painter, Paul Ingbretson.

Free and open to the public. Thanks to the Tarbell Charitable Trust and the Groton Cultural Council

Image: My Family at Cotuit, Edmund C. Tarbell, 1898