New Web objects Portrait

William Merritt Chase

Date: c. 1885

Credit Line: Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection

Object number: 1992.26

Text Entries: An accomplished portraitist, Chase depicts the young model woman posed for action: dressed for an outdoor excursion with one foot forward she stands on the brink of movement. Her fashionable attire bespeaks her social standing yet Chase opts not to include any additional "props." Set against a monochromatic background and barely casting a shadow, she stares out from the canvas with a self-assured directness and an expression of intelligence. A captured moment before posed inactivity turns to action, Chase's canvas can serve as a study of the changing social expectations of the nineteenth-century woman, and in this sense it achieves Chase's goal of expressing "a perfect type of American womanhood."