William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase
1849 - 1916
American painter and printmaker. Chase received his early training in Indianapolis from the portrait painter Barton S. Hays (1826–75). In 1869 he went to New York to study at the National Academy of Design where he exhibited in 1871. That year he joined his family in St Louis, where John Mulvaney (1844–1906) encouraged him to study in Munich. With the support of several local patrons, enabling him to live abroad for the next six years, Chase entered the Königliche Akademie in Munich in 1872. Among his teachers were Alexander von Wagner (1838–1919), KARL THEODOR VON PILOTY and Wilhelm von Diez (1839–1907). Chase also admired the work of WILHELM LEIBL. The school emphasized bravura brushwork, a technique that became integral to Chase’s style, favoured a dark palette and encouraged the study of Old Master painters, particularly Diego Velázquez and Frans Hals. Among Chase’s friends in Munich were the American artists Walter Shirlaw, J. Frank Currier and Frederick Dielman (1847–1935), as well as Frank Duveneck and John H. Twachtman, who accompanied him on a nine-month visit to Venice in 1877.
In 1878 Chase returned to New York to teach at the Art Students League. Despite his youth and his extended stay in Europe, Chase was not unknown to the American art world, for he had exhibited at the National Academy of Design in 1875, received a medal of honour at the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia and won critical attention for his portrait Ready for the Ride (1877; New York, Un. League Club), shown at the inaugural exhibition of the Society of American Artists.
The 1880s were for Chase a period of intense activity, as well as artistic growth and maturity. He continued to teach at the Art Students League and to give private lessons in his studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building. In 1881 he won an honourable mention at the Paris Salon for a portrait of Duveneck entitled The Smoker (presumably destroyed by fire). That year he made the first of many trips to Europe, which brought him into contact with the Belgian painter ALFRED STEVENS and the work of the French Impressionists (see fig.). Their influence is apparent in the lighter palette of the portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler (1883; Cleveland, OH, Mus. A.) and Sunlight and Shadow (1884; Omaha, NE, Joslyn A. Mus.). In 1885 Chase met JAMES MCNEILL WHISTLER in London. The two agreed to paint each other’s portrait, although only Chase’s of Whistler was completed (James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1885; New York, Met.). Subsequently Whistler’s influence can be seen in a remarkable group of large, full-length female portraits painted between 1886 and 1895: two portraits of Maria Benedict, Lady in Black (1888; New York, Met.) and Lady in Pink (1888–9; Providence, RI Sch. Des., Mus. A.), are characterized by a subtly modulated palette accented by shots of brilliant colour, a simple, soft and atmospheric background and brushwork that is lively but not overbearing.
Chase, a member of many art groups, organized with ROBERT FREDERICK BLUM in 1882 the American Society of Painters in Pastel, which presented four exhibitions between 1884 and 1890. Chase’s work in pastel is among the most important in American art. Whether rendering a single figure as in Back of a Nude (c. 1888; New York, priv. col., see R. G. Pisano, 1979, p. 47) or creating a complex interior with figures as in Hall at Shinnecock (1893; Chicago, IL, Terra Mus. Amer. A.), Chase handled pastels with the same skill and panache as he did oils.
In 1883 Chase helped to select American paintings for the Munich Glaspalast exhibition and assisted with the organization of the Bartholdi Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition which, while raising money for the base of the Statue of Liberty, brought important examples of modern European art to America. In 1886 the Boston Art Club held a major exhibition featuring 133 works by Chase. During the decade Chase also served as president of the Society of American Artists, for a one-year term in 1880 and, after his election in 1885, for ten years.
In 1891 Chase founded the Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island near the village of Southampton. He conducted classes at this, the first important summer art school in America, until 1902. Chase was known primarily as a Realist, but landscapes that he produced at Shinnecock during the 1890s, such as the Fairy Tale (1892; priv. col., see 1983–4 exh. cat., p. 315), capture the essence of American Impressionism (see also At the Seaside, 1892). These works are more brilliantly coloured and place greater emphasis on transient atmospheric effects than his earlier park and coastal scenes painted around New York and Brooklyn in the late 1880s. Teaching remained an important part of Chase’s life. In addition to his classes at Shinnecock and those at the Art Students League (until 1896, and again 1907–12), Chase taught at the Brooklyn Art Association (1887, 1891–5), at the Chase School of Art (renamed the New York School of Art in 1899) between 1897 and 1907 and at the Pennsylvania Academy of Art (1896–1909). Except in 1906, he took students to Europe every summer from 1903 to 1912. Chase encouraged his pupils to work directly from nature and the model. He stressed technique over subject-matter and advocated drawing directly on the canvas with a fully loaded brush, eschewing a preliminary sketch in pencil or charcoal. His students, who included Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Georgia O’Keeffe, Charles Sheeler and Joseph Stella, developed very diverse styles, suggesting that Chase provided them with inspiration but did not insist on imitation.
Chase’s prominence in the latter part of his life is reflected in the numerous honours he continued to receive. Although by the 1913 Armory Show his style of elegant realism was being superseded by modernist trends, a gallery was devoted to his work at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exposition in San Francisco (for an example of later work, see Still-life: Fish). [Carolyn Kinder Carr. "Chase, William Merritt." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 4, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T016128.]
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