Portrait of Alice Gerson

William Merritt Chase’s Portrait of Alice Gerson is a close-up portrayal of the artist’s favorite model and future wife. Alice is shown leaning her head back against an undefined surface and gazing at the viewer with liquid dark eyes, her long hair falling in a dark mantle around her face. Both the background and the figure’s shoulders and chest are merely suggested as flat areas of vigorously hatched graphite strokes, but Alice’s pale face comes into focus through more delicate, though still evident marks. Fully worked drawings are relatively rare in the work of Chase, who favored the progressive practice of painting directly onto canvas without the use of preliminary drawings. Here, however, the artist resorted to rapidly applied graphite and the reductive use of dramatic contrasts of light and dark to capture Alice's face on an intimate scale.

Small and dark, thirteen-year-old Alice, youngest daughter of Julius Gerson, an enlightened supporter of American artists, captivated the much older Chase when he met her in 1880, and she modeled frequently for him. The two were married in 1886 after a long courtship, when she was twenty and he was thirty-seven. The couple eventually had eleven children, of whom eight survived infancy. Romantic to the point of melancholy, Portrait of Alice Gerson testifies to the strong bond between the artist and a sitter who is no longer a mere model but someone to whom the artist was personally attached..

On Process: Studio Themes, Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois (organizer). Venue: Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, Illinois, January 13–March 4, 2001.

Visages de l'Amérique: de George Washington à Marilyn Monroe (Faces of America: From George Washington to Marilyn Monroe), Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France (organizer). Venue: Musée d'Art Américain Giverny, France, April 1–October 31, 2004 (on exhibit partial run: April 1–July 5, 2004). [exh. cat.]

Gallati, Barbara. William Merritt Chase. New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995. Text p. 30; ill. p. 30 (black & white).

Pisano, Ronald G.; completed by D. Frederick Baker and Carolyn K. Lane. William Merritt Chase; Still Lifes, Interiors, Figures, Copies of Old Masters and Drawings (The Complete Catalogue of Known and Documented Work of William Merritt Chase, Vol 4). New Haven, Connecticut: Yale University Press, 2010. Ill. p.197, D.67 (color).