You’re just like all these others - the vulgar crowd.” Chase, in fact, taught classes throughout most of his career. Using his favorite nickname for his friend, Whistler once told Chase, “After all, Colonel, the only real objection I have to you is that you teach. Chase held open house every Saturday, attracting students and fellow artists. Chase’s props, which show up in some of his paintings, included Japanese fans, tapestries, 37 Russian samovars, a bust of Voltaire and a stuffed flamingo. Albert Bierstadt had used the studio earlier to paint his enormous Western canvases. He rented a large space with a second-story balcony in the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York. A servant in a fez and Turkish pantaloons sometimes followed them.Ĭhase also insisted that a sumptuous studio full of props for portraits and for costume parties should serve as a vital part of the elegant artist’s insignia. He usually walked the streets of New York with a white Russian wolfhound. He sported a walrus mustache, a high French silk hat, an expensive suit and a thick black ribbon for his pince-nez eyeglasses. He did not dress like an impoverished bohemian artist but like an eccentric grandee. His American mood and fresh ideas produced such masterpieces as “A City Park,” an Impressionist landscape of the new Tompkins Park in Brooklyn “Hide and Seek,” a mysterious interior painting of two girls playing, seen only from behind and the haunting red and black portrait “The Young Orphan,” painted in the style of his friend Whistler’s arrangements of color, especially in the famous painting of his mother, now in the Musée d’Orsay in Paris.Ĭhase believed that Americans should accord artists a special place in society, and he engaged in a good deal of theatrical self-promotion to help achieve this. So his vast output included scenes of Venice, self portraits, paintings of his own studio chock-full of bric-a-brac, nudes and still lifes so realistic that collector Duncan Phillips once wrote, “he is unequaled by any other painter in the representation of the shiny, slippery, fishiness of fish.”īut Chase also applied the techniques of European artistry to American subject matter and experimented with new techniques, creating wonderful Impressionist landscapes of New York City’s Central Park and the new parks of Brooklyn, studies of modern American women at rest, unsettling pictures of children at play, and everyday scenes of the backyards of Brooklyn homes. Visitors may be surprised at the variety of the 70 paintings and pastels in the show, including his historical portrait of a European jester snorting a bit of wine to prepare for his act (“‘Keying Up’ - The Court Jester,” 1875, which won a prize at the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial fair and is now owned by the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts) and beach scenes on Long Island in New York.Ĭhase, who was born in Indiana in 1849, the son of a shoe store owner, studied art in Munich, Germany, and intended his works to fit into the long tradition of European painting. The latest, a large retrospective titled “William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master,” opened at the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., this month and goes on to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in October and the International Gallery of Modern Art in Venice, Italy, in February. A small band of historians, curators and artists - many of them experts in 19th century American art - have tried from time to time to mount shows, some small and very specific, some rather large, to entice renewed interest in Chase. Yet while the general public lost interest in Chase, the artist did keep special admirers. Patrons rarely rush to museums to see a Chase. Americans who know something about his contemporaries and friends James McNeill Whistler and John Singer Sargent usually know nothing about William Merritt Chase. Many Europeans agreed.īut in the last hundred years since his death, almost all this adulation has dissipated. But few have fallen so far and remained so hidden as William Merritt Chase.Īrt historian John Davis reports that in the 1880s, when Chase was just in his 30s, “he had come to dominate the American art scene.” Many Americans hailed him as their finest artist. Reputations can fall swiftly in the world of art, sometimes in mysterious ways.
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