CHASE, William Merritt - b. 1849 Williamsburg, d. 1916 New York - WGA

CHASE, William Merritt

(b. 1849 Williamsburg, d. 1916 New York)

American painter. He studied in Indianapolis and in Munich under Piloty. In 1878 he began his long career as an influential teacher at the Art Students League of New York and later established his own summer school of landscape painting in the Shinnecock Hills on Long Island.

Chase was a prolific painter of portraits, interiors, still-lifes and landscapes, famed for establishing the fresh colour and bravura technique used in much early 20th-century American painting. Proficient in many media, he is best known for his spirited portraits and still-lifes in oil. His Carmencita, Lady in Black, and portrait of Whistler (all: Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York) and My Daughter Alice (Cleveland Museum of Art) are characteristic.

Chase is considered one of the most important American Impressionists, his work being close in style to that of the early French Impressionists. He was the most important American teacher of his time. He was president of the Society of American Artists for 10 years and a member of the National Academy of Design.

End of the Season

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Idle Hours

Teaching in public or state art schools by artists associated with Impressionism was of central importance in the American dissemination of the new art and its ideas. Summer schools devoted to open-air painting became established in the 1890s as an integral part of American art teaching. The most popular and successful of the schools was the Shinnecock Summer School, opened on Long Island in 1891. It was founded by William Merrit Chase who taught the methods and practice of open-air painting there for twelve consecutive summers.

The carefree cheerfulness that Chase’s canvases emanate became increasingly Impressionist in technique as the 1890s wore on. He became master of the flickering atmospherics of light set off by blue strips of sea or sky and enlivened by women and children in bright summer dresses. The dunes and beaches of Shinnecock on Long Island provided Chase with his staple material. A particularly fine example of this period in his work is Idle Hours.

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The Kimono

One of the influences Chase absorbed while in Europe was the taste for Japanese prints, something widespread in artistic circles in Paris in the 1870s. Back in America, he made a series of portraits of friends and family in Japanese dress and with Japanese decorative elements, as in the present painting.

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The Open Air Breakfast

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The Shinnecock Hills

Teaching in public or state art schools by artists associated with Impressionism was of central imporrtance in the American dissemination of the new art and its ideas. Summer schools devoted to open-air painting became established in the 1890s as an integral part of American art teaching. The most popular and successful of the schools was the Shinnecock Summer School, opened on Long Island in 1891. It was founded by William Merrit Chase who taught the methods and practice of open-air painting there for twelve consecutive summers.

This panel depicts a simple spot near the artist’s house. The simplicity of the landscape, in which very few elements stand out, indicates Chase’s search for beauty in the simplest things.

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