SELF-PORTRAIT: PURE PERCEPTION
page 43)? Kehoe’s most mysterious self-portraits could be the
intelligence and sensitivity, with the ability to transform the commonplace world that surrounds us into radiance. Perhaps it is the persona of a magician. ■
TIM KENNEDY (timkennedypaintings.com) is a senior lecturer in the Painting Area at Indiana University Bloomington. He exhibits his work regularly at First Street Gallery in New York City.
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anniversary of William Merritt Chase’s death.
LEFT: A splendid example of Chase’s mastery of pastel, Hall at Shinnecock (1892; pastel on canvas, 3211⁄8x41), with its repeated large vases and young girls seated in white pinafores, appears to ref- erence John Singer Sargent’s The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit.
Chase’s self-portrait, refl ected in the glass door of a distant armoire, suggests an infl uence vital to both himself and Sargent, that of Velázquez’s Las Meninas.
TERRA FOUNDATION FOR AMERICAN ART, DANIEL J. TERRA COLLECTION
Celebrating a
Modern Master
By Jerry N. Weiss
The paintings of William Merritt Chase
depict a life of domestic ease and material success. He belonged to the last gen- eration of international artists—a generation that included John Singer Sargent, Anders Zorn, Valentin Serov, Joaquín Sorolla, Giovanni Boldini and James Whistler—whose paintings were expected to display the benefi ts of a life of lei-
sure. “William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master,” now showing at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, presents Chase at his best, at the intersection of two dis- parate infl uences: the tradition of 17th-century painting and the modern vision of impressionism. For his portrait work Chase often favored the dark palette of the old masters, yet he was, by some accounts, the fi rst painter in America to practice impressionism, with its dots and dashes of broken color.
Chase played a prominent and innovative role in American art. He pretty much invented urban landscape painting in the United States, presided over the fi rst major landscape painting school in this country, and was for many years our most infl uential teacher of young artists. Additionally, he was one of the fi nest portrait and fi gure painters of his time. Although his life was marked by multiple setbacks, Chase’s work always refl ected an irrepressible optimism.
Munich and the Tenth Street Studio
Born in Indianapolis in 1849, Chase studied briefl y at the National Academy of Design in New York City before returning to the Midwest to assist his parents fi nan- cially. In St. Louis, a group of businessmen, impressed by his youthful talent, off ered material support for Chase to continue his studies in Munich. He spent six years in
BOTTOM LEFT: Painted while Chase was studying in Munich, The Turkish Page (Unexpected Intrusion) (1876; oil on canvas, 41ẳx3711⁄8), exhibited in New York in 1877, helped to establish the young artist’s reputation prior to his return to America. The painting refl ects the then current interest in Orientalism and, more specifi cally, Chase’s love of complex fabrics.
CINCINNATI ART MUSEUM, GIFT OF THE JOHN LEVY GALLERIES, 1923
BOTTOM RIGHT: The Tenth Street Studio (1880; oil on canvas, 36ẳx48ẳ) gives evidence of the expensive and exotic furnishings for which Chase’s studio was renowned.
Although this ostentation was surely a stratagem signaling his ambitions, the atmosphere also refl ected a genuine interest in the symbols and trappings of culture.
ST. LOUIS ART MUSEUM, BEQUEST OF ALBERT BLAIR
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Th e Turkish Page (opposite) show his facility as a draftsman and painter, and presage an interest in sumptuous textures that would characterize his mature studio work.
His reputation having preceded him, Chase returned to the United States in 1878 and procured a job teaching at the Art Students League of New York. He moved into the well-known Tenth Street Studio Building, converting his studio into the most lavish artist’s space in the city (see Th e Tenth Street Studio, opposite).
Exotically furnished, it became a cultural attraction in Manhattan, with the artist hosting Saturday receptions, classes, meetings, dinners and music recitals.
Th e European sophistication that Chase brought to the New York art world had considerable impact. Art historian Barbara Dayer Gallati noted his importance in altering “the concept of the artist from bohemian outsider to the status of gen- tlemanly sophisticate.” Th ese changes in the public’s perception didn’t come easily;
Chase’s St. Louis benefactors, preferring his earlier tight work, were not pleased by the painterly direction he’d taken during his years abroad. In the early 1880s, newspaper critics voiced their displeasure with what they saw as Chase’s “tricky eff ects” and his “heavy and inaccurate” hand.
A trip to Paris in 1881—there would be many visits to Europe in the ensuing years—kindled Chase’s interest in plein air work and the adoption of a lighter palette.
Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn (ca 1887; oil on wood panel, 15ẳx1855⁄8) is composed of a patch-
work of drying linen, illuminated at intervals by direct sunlight and strung along a zigzag of diagonal clotheslines. Painted over a red ground, the work gives every indi- cation of having been started and fi nished, wet-into-wet, in one ses- sion. At the time, this was a nearly unique free and confi dent handling of oil painting in America.
COLLECTION OF LILLY ENDOWMENT, INC.
While painting in France and Holland, Chase also started using pastel; back in New York, his work in the medium infl uenced other artists, and he helped found the American Society of Painters in Pastel (see Hall at Shinnecock, pages 46–47).
During another visit overseas in 1885, Chase befriended Whistler in London, and the two traveled together to Holland before parting on strained terms.
New York Cityscapes
In 1887 Chase married Alice Gerson, a young woman who, along with her sis- ters, had modeled for the artist since her girlhood. Alice gave birth to their fi rst child the day after their wedding—twelve more children, seven of whom survived infancy, would follow. Th e scandal of Alice’s pregnancy compelled the couple to leave Manhattan for the more private confi nes of Brooklyn (see Washing Day—A Backyard Reminiscence of Brooklyn, page 49). In years to come, Chase’s wife and children would be the subjects of many of his fi nest paintings.
In the late 1880s, Chase became the fi rst major American artist to paint the urban landscape in oil. Between 1886 and 1890 he surveyed the straight and winding pathways, open spaces and shaded bowers of Prospect Park and Tompkins Park in Brooklyn and Central Park in Manhattan (see A City Park, above). Th e many canvases Chase painted and exhibited of the parks were stud- ies of cultivated landscapes and a gentrifi ed populace. Mostly, mothers and young children feature in these paintings, refl ecting the new circumstances of Chase’s own life. Sometimes Chase painted his young family relaxing by the Brooklyn waterfront, but more often he set up on the city’s docks to paint small
ABOVE: Not only was the composi- tion of A City Park (ca 1887; oil on canvas, 1355⁄8x195⁄8) modern in its vast open foreground and plunging diagonal walkway, but the paint- ing was thematically unusual as well. Chase biographer Barbara Dayer Gallati wrote of his genteel urban narratives, “Yet even these tentative forays around the margins of modern life are extraordinarily progressive in comparison with the imagery of Chase’s American col- leagues.”
ART INSTITUTE OF CHICAGO, BEQUEST OF DR. JOHN J. IRELAND
OPPOSITE: Idle Hours (ca 1894; oil on canvas, 25ẵx35ẵ) captures the domestic indolence of a sum- mer day at Shinnecock; the only threat to the mood is provided by a vaguely ominous bank of clouds.
AMON CARTER MUSEUM OF AMERICAN ART, FORT WORTH, TEXAS
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“I am never so disappointed in a piece of my work as when it meets with the approval of the public.”