Displaying items by tag: william merritt chase

In late November of 1907, New York newspapers trumpeted a controversy that had the art world in an uproar. Headlines exclaimed: "Artist Chase Leaves: Withdraws from the New York School of Art, Which He Founded"; and "Wm. M. Chase Forced Out of New York Art School: Triumph for the 'New Movement' Led by Robert Henri." William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) and Robert Henri (1865-1929) were renowned teachers and two of the best known American artists at the turn of the twentieth century. But their relationship, which had begun in mutual admiration, ended in headlining animosity, as the two fought bitterly over the nature of art and its future direction in America. Enacting their differences on a national stage, they forced a generation of artists to address the same issues and to shape their own conclusions.

William Merritt Chase: Still Lifes, Interiors, Figures, Copies of Old Masters, and Drawings, is the fourth and final volume of The Complete Catalogue of Known and Documented Work by William Merritt Chase (1849–1916). It completes the life’s work of Ronald G. Pisano, who worked on the project for more than thirty years before his untimely death in 2000. These volumes set the record of the remarkable life and work of an American artist remembered as “… a man with the rare combination in qualities of a gentleman, a human being, an artist and a worker. His ideals for art were all absorbing and his beliefs in its power absolutely unshakable…the ideals for which William M. Chase lived and worked are the eternal truths of the power of art in man’s expression in any materials with which he lives.”1

Best known as an instructor and exponent of Impressionism, Chase began his teaching career at the Art Students’ League shortly after his return from studies at the Royal Munich Academy in 1878. In 1891, he opened the Shinnecock Summer School of Art, near Southampton, Long Island, New York. After closing the school in 1902, he began organizing summer schools in Europe, beginning in Haarlem, Holland, in 1903.

When he was twenty years old, William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) set out to become an artist. That he became one of the most honored and respected American artists of his day was the result of extraordinary talent, determination, and canny self-marketing. However, he kept no known records, daily calendar, list of sitters, or diary; very few letters survive; and, except for early paintings, Chase rarely dated his work. It is only through lifetime exhibition and auction records, and periodicals and books of the period that his paintings can be arranged chronologically, and as a by-product, the original titles of many of the works confirmed.

Chase's earliest landscapes date from his years as a student at the Munich Royal Academy (1872–1877). Somewhat tonal in nature, they mainly record streets and buildings in the small towns where Chase and his fellow students spent the summer months away from the academy. In the fall of 1877, Chase went to Venice with two of his classmates, Frank Duveneck (1848–1919) and John Twachtman (1853–1902). Although ill for much of his time there, he completed several paintings of which Venice, 1877 (Fig. 1) is a prime example. It wasn't until he returned to New York in 1878 and joined the Tile Club that he pursued landscape painting as a more disciplined pursuit. The club was the first plein-air sketching club in America, and over its ten-year life organized four summer painting expeditions, three to Long Island and one along the Hudson River to Lake Champlain. It was on the second trip to Long Island, in 1880, that Chase painted A Subtle Device (Fig. 2), a portrait of himself seated under a jerry-rigged net studio on the beach near Sands Point—the netting device being a means to avoid a plague of mosquitoes. During these early years, Chase also painted the beach at Coney Island, and the Hackensack River in New Jersey, the latter when he visited the summer home of the Gerson family—specifically to see young Alice Gerson whom he would later marry.