A young woman writes at a desk and a teenage girl reads a book in an armchair in an opulent room in this nearly square painting. Both women have rosy, peach-colored skin and honey-brown hair.
   To our left, the woman is shown from the knees up as she sits at a tall, mahogany-red, secretary desk. The desk has an emerald-green, tilted writing surface and two shelves packed with books and covered by glass doors, one of which is open. The desk has brass pulls on the drawers under and behind the writing surface, and the cabinet is topped with two curling scrolls to create a triangular pediment. The woman bends over her paper, facing our left in profile as she leans over and looks down at her writing. Her hair is loosely rolled up and pinned in place. She wears a white dress with ruffled, elbow-length sleeves and a lilac-purple sash. Golden chains hang from her neck almost to her lap, and a gold bracelet encircles her wrist.
   To our right and near the back corner of the room, the girl sits in a high-backed, wicker armchair. She hooks her right elbow, to our left, over the arm of the chair and leans in that direction, with a green pillow tucked into to her other side. Her body faces us and she looks down at a blue book in her hands. She has a round face, a straight nose, and her lips are closed. The girl’s hair is half pulled up in a dark bow atop her head as the rest falls around her shoulders. Her dress is streaked with pale gray, white, and harvest yellow, and is tied at the waist. Between the women, a dark brown cabinet or table holds a glass decanter with a glass stopper and lamp with a shiny, bulbus, white base and an off-white, rounded shade.
   Warm sunlight pours in from the two tall windows framed with ruffled, silvery-white curtains that flank the table, between the women. Mottled moss green and butter yellow suggest trees outside. The jamb of a French door runs along the right edge of the painting, beyond the reading girl. Several framed pictures hang on the sage-green walls. The artist signed the painting in the lower right: “Tarbell.”

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   Edmund Tarbelll, acclaimed in the early years of the twentieth century as "the poet of domesticity," established his reputation as a painter of well-bred young women in sunlit gardens and tastefully appointed interiors. Along with Frank Benson, Joseph DeCamp, William Paxton, and other painters of the Boston School, Tarbell synthesized a wide range of cosmopolitan stylistic influences in representing the contemporary world of the elite New England culture he knew best. Josephine and Mercie, which depicts two of the artist's daughters in a sitting room of the family's summer home in New Castle, New Hampshire, was immediately praised for its "perfect rendering of values" and for "discover[ing] in familiar surroundings elements of genuine beauty." 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.

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