William Merritt Chase Biography

William Merritt Chase

Also Known as: William M. Chase

Born:

Williamsburg, Indiana 1849

Died:

New York, New York 1916

Active in:

Shinnecock, New York

Biography

Painter and teacher. Chase's early paintings, executed in dark tonalities, reflected his training in Munich; his later paintings, most notably scenes of Shinnecock, Long Island, were painted with a lightened palette, reflecting the influence of French Impressionism. He had a lengthy teaching career at the Art Students League, the New York School of Art, the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the summer school he founded on Long Island.

Joan Stahl American Artists in Photographic Portraits from the Peter A. Juley & Son Collection(Washington, D.C. and Mineola, New York: National Museum of American Art and Dover Publications, Inc., 1995)

William Merritt Chase, son of a shopkeeper, left Indiana at the age of twenty to study at the National Academy of Design in New York. Domestic financial reverses interrupted his studies as his family resettled in St. Louis. Young William's talent so impressed several businessmen in that city that they proposed to underwrite his further study abroad. In 1872, Chase began attendance at the Royal Academy in Munich, where he remained six years and acquired the flashy old-master style with dark palette and virtuoso brushwork, which characterized that popular academy. A sojourn in Venice with fellow students Frank Duveneck and John Twachtman rounded out his European training. He returned to New York in 1898 to assume a teaching post at the Art Students League, beginning an enormously successful thirty-eight-year career that would include such students as Edward Hopper, Georgia O'Keeffe, Rockwell Kent, and Charles Sheeler.

Once settled into Manhattan, Chase rented studio space in the old Tenth Street Studios, previously occupied by painters of the Hudson River school. Brimming with self-confidence and resolved not to be outshone in his accommodations, Chase acquired the vast salon space in which Albert Bierstadt had executed his monumental western landscapes. At great expense, Chase converted the studio into an exotic showplace, which became a social center for the local artistic fraternity; the gesture enhanced his reputation as a genteel Bohemian and also attracted numerous prestigious and remunerative portrait commissions.

In 1881 the Belgian painter Alfred Stevens encouraged Chase to abandon the bravura old-master technique he had acquired in Munich and to experiment with a modified impressionist style by lightening his palette and enlivening his picture surface with looser, more painterly brushwork. Chase explored this new direction further by experimenting with pastel and plein air painting.

In 1886 he married Alice Gerson, a family friend who had modeled for him, and they produced a large family whose members became favored subjects for his brush.

In 1892 he built a summer home at Shinnecock on the south branch of Long Island. There, among the dunes, in the bright sunlight and sea air his painterly impulse was given free sway, and he produced some of his freest and loveliest work. Shinnecock also became one of his most successful and popular teaching venues, and he was encouraged to initiate the Chase School in Manhattan, which was modeled on the Académie Julian in Paris. But Chase lacked the business acumen to make it succeed, and under other management it became the New York School of Art.

During these years Chase had developed and continued to employ two different styles of painting: the impressionistic plein air landscapes and genre scenes, and the somber realism of his portraits and still-life works. In his later years his still-life oeuvre was enhanced by an extraordinary series of fish studies, in which the artist's virtuoso brush transforms the pink and white luminosity of the recumbent fish to an object of almost abstract beauty. He often executed such studies in three or four hours.

In 1902, after the premature death of his friend John Twachtman, Chase was invited to join the recently organized Ten American Painters and he continued to exhibit with them until the end of his working career. After a long and painful illness, Chase died in 1916, at the age of sixty-seven, mourned by hundreds of devoted students. Sadly, only three years before, examples of his work had been excluded from the momentous Armory Show, which signaled a new era for American art. Chase's reputation languished for several decades thereafter.

Emery Battis Artist Biographies for the exhibition American Impressionism: Treasures from the Smithsonian American Art Museum (Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian American Art Museum, 2000)

William Merritt Chase dominated the universe of American art during the late 19th century. He was one of the first artists to turn out Impressionist landscapes in the United States, a portrait painter of the first rank, a master of still life, a renowned teacher, a leader of societies of artists, and a gifted connoisseur of European painting. He also knew everyone who counted in American art.

Chase believed in theatrical self-promotion, and cultivated a bohemian guise and public image of artful sophistication that won him both publicity and patrons. It was his studio, however, that made him a celebrity. Crammed full of objets d'art and exotic treasures—, Japanese fans, East Indian drums, paintings, tapestries, Phoenician glass, ornate frames, a stuffed flamingo and 37 Russian samovars, —the spacious suite Chase rented at the Tenth Street Studio Building in New York soon became the talk of the town. Illustrations of the studio were featured in art magazines, and Henry Adams and other novelists employed it as a setting for their fiction.

Chase had studied at the Royal Academy in Munich and adopted the dark, lush colors and bold brushwork that characterized the prevailing style there. In the late 1880s, however, he changed his approach and turned to the brighter, lighter palette and shorter brushstrokes of the French Impressionists. He also took his canvases and easel out-of-doors to directly capture scenes of American life. 
One of the most prominent art teachers of his day, Chase was also the founder of the Chase School of Art (now the Parsons School of Design) in New York. The roster of his students included such future luminaries as Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and Rockwell Kent. "William Merritt Chase's teaching, like the British drumbeat," declared the Chicago Post, "is heard round the world."

A painter known for his still lifes, portraits, and landscapes, William Merritt Chase was born in Williamsburg, Indiana . In 1867 he began studying art with Barton S. Hays in Indianapolis and then moved to New York, where he studied with Joseph Oriel Eaton and also at the National Academy of Design with Lemuel Wilmarth. In 1871 Chase enrolled at the Royal Academy in Munich. After returning to New York, in 1879 he founded the Art Club along with Julian Alden Weir and Albert Pinkham Ryder. During the next decade he began experimenting with open-air painting, and as a result of this new interest in light and atmosphere, his palette lightened. Chase taught art at many schools, beginning in 1878 at the Art Students League. In 1896 he established the Chase School of Art, which was renamed the New York School of Art after he relinquished his administrative role. Chase was a member of many art organizations, including the Society of American Artists, serving as president in 1885, the Academy of Arts and Letters, and the National Association of Portrait Painters. The recipient of numerous awards for his many American exhibitions, Chase also was honored with a knighthood in the Order of Saint Michael by the prince regent of Bavaria in 1908.

William Merritt Chase made monotypes over a period of at least thirty-four years, beginning with his first efforts in the late 1870s or early 1880s through at least 1914, when he gave demonstrations of the process while teaching a summer class in Carmel, California. A monotype that probably dates from his stay in Carmel is a self-portrait of the artist wearing a straw hat, which suggests the casual dress he probably favored in California. The creases in many of his monotype impressions indicate that they were printed either by an inexperienced printer or on a makeshift press, such as the wringer washing machine he purchased in Carmel. During his stay in California, Chase made several small self-portrait monotypes that he sent to his wife, who had remained on the East Coast.

http://americanart.si.edu/exhibitions/online/monotypes/chaseobj.html