In the years after the Civil War, New England in general and Massachusetts in particular experienced rapid social, economic, and political change that destabilized traditional hierarchies of class, gender, and ethnicity. As the **New York Times** would explain in 1917, "Interiors by Mr. Tarbell should be prized by Americans for their truthful interpretation of a singularly distinct phase of American life that can hardly survive the influences of the present century."
Tarbell was deeply rooted in the New England culture represented in his art. His ancestors had lived in Massachusetts since 1638 and he grew up and received his early artistic training in Boston. He purchased his house at New Castle, a coastal village that had once been the colonial government seat, in 1905, and immediately set about making it into the "ideal home." Enlisting his wife and children as models, Tarbell deployed the interior spaces of the house as a surrogate studio in which his family members are as artfully arranged as the furniture. Absorbed in reading and writing and dressed in white, Tarbell's daughters are perfect embodiments of the American Girl—wholesome, healthy, and literate. Their dresses, which visually rhyme with the ruffled curtains, establish a close relationship between the interior setting and the figures: the Colonial Revival interior and the girls both suggest innocence and continuity with an idealized New England Past.