William Merritt Chase

Both as an artist and as one of the most influential teachers of painting in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, William Merritt Chase was instrumental in introducing American artists to progressive approaches to art-making that were being developed in contemporary European art centers. Born in Indiana, Chase studied art in Indianapolis and New York City before enrolling in the Royal Academy in Munich, Germany, which attracted many American midwestern artists at the time. During his six years abroad, between 1872 and 1878, Chase became a lifelong admirer of the Spanish baroque painter Diego Velázquez (1599–1660), whose dramatic dark palette and paint-laden brushstrokes he emulated in his early works.

Chase settled in New York in 1878 to teach at the progressive Art Students League. He exhibited with success at the traditional National Academy of Design, to which he was elected a full member in 1890, but he was also closely associated with the Academy’s rival, the progressive Society of American Artists, which was more receptive to modern styles of painting imported from Munich and from Paris. As reflected in the lavish interior of his studio in New York’s Tenth Street Studio Building, the subject of many of his paintings, Chase was a highly eclectic artist: his works reflect a full range of the influences shaping modern art of his time, from Japanese prints to the old masters. His elegant, decorative portraits were influenced by the work of the iconoclastic American expatriate artist James McNeill Whistler, whom he met in London in 1885. His landscapes and scenes of modern life share the bright color, facile brushwork, and cropped compositions of impressionism. Beginning in the mid-1880s, Chase was among the first painters to depict the modern American city, which he interpreted largely through images of urban parks. He broke ground not only in oil painting but in pastel, a medium then enjoying new respect among professional artists: in 1882, he was a founder of the American Society of Painters in Pastel.

A member of numerous artists’ organizations, Chase helped organize important exhibitions that introduced the work of French and American impressionist painters to the American public in the early 1880s. He was also highly influential as a teacher, not only at the Art Students League but in his own school in New York and in classes he gave in other American cities and abroad. Beginning in 1891, he conducted a popular summer school at Shinnecock, on New York’s Long Island. Stressing technique over subject matter, Chase encouraged the practice of painting directly on canvas without preliminary drawing, and of working outdoors and on-site rather than in the studio. The diverse work of his many students, who include some of the most important artists of the next generation, demonstrates his tolerance for individual and experimental approaches. As an artist, Chase described himself as a realist rather than an impressionist, but his use of lively, broken brushstrokes, contemporary subject matter, and bright color was key to the growing acceptance of modern styles in late-nineteenth-century America. Although Chase lived to see his art superseded by new trends, he was much honored in his last years.