Biography

The Boston School describes a circle of American painters working in and around Boston from the late nineteenth century into the early twentieth century. The school was not a formally constituted society: artists were associated through teaching, exhibitions and shared interests, particularly at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, William McGregor Paxton and Joseph DeCamp are among its central figures. Their portraits and domestic interiors combine careful drawing with sensitive treatment of light, often drawing on both Impressionism and the Dutch painting tradition. The wider Boston artistic community included women painters and artists specialising in landscapes, still lifes and portraiture.

Artists and participants

Leading painters

• Frank Weston Benson (1862–1951)
• Joseph DeCamp (1858–1923)
• Edmund Tarbell (1862–1938)
• William McGregor Paxton (1869–1941)

Other artists associated with the Boston School and its circle

• Philip Leslie Hale (1865–1931)
• Lilian Westcott Hale (1880–1963)
• Lilla Cabot Perry (1848–1933)
• John Joseph Enneking (1841–1916)
• Hermann Dudley Murphy (1867–1945)
• Elizabeth Okie Paxton (1877–1971)
• Laura Coombs Hills (1859–1952)
• Gretchen Woodman Rogers (1881–1967)
• Aldro Hibbard (1886–1972)
• Frederic Porter Vinton (1846–1911)
• Marie Danforth Page (1869–1940)
• Ellen Day Hale (1855–1940)
• Mary Brewster Hazelton (1868–1953)
• Arthur Merton Hazard (1872–1930)
• William Worcester Churchill (1858–1926)