William Merritt Chase - Modern Magdalen [c.1888]

William Merritt Chase - Modern Magdalen [c.1888], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

[Oil on canvas, 48.3 x 39.4 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Idle Hours [c.1894]

William Merritt Chase - Idle Hours [c.1894], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Between 1891 and 1902 Chase (American, 1849–1916) found genteel outdoor subjects in Southampton, Long Island, where he directed the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art. In this scene, set on the scrubby dunes along Shinnecock Bay, he shows four of his frequent models: a woman in a red bonnet (probably his wife), two of his daughters, and, possibly, one of Mrs. Chase's sisters. Chase invites the viewer to fill in the picture's sketchy forms and elusive story. Idle Hours, which is typical of the pictures of urbanites enjoying suburban retreats that displaced images of country folk at play, hints at the growth of leisure time in response to urbanisation and industrialisation, women's predominance at summer resorts while their husbands worked in the city, and unaccompanied women's preference for safe seaside pastimes. The narrative may also be as simple as Henry James's observation: "Summer afternoon, summer afternoon; to me those have always been the two most beautiful words in the English language."

[Oil on canvas, 99.1 x 123.5 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Alice in the Shinnecock Studio [c.1900]

William Merritt Chase - Alice in the Shinnecock Studio [c.1900], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

William Merritt Chase (1849 – 1916) was an American painter. 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. Proficient in many media, Chase is best known for his spirited portraits and still lifes in oil. 

[Oil on canvas, 96.84 x 108.59 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Friendly Call [1895]

William Merritt Chase - Friendly Call [1895], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

William Merritt Chase, an influential art teacher and one of the leading exponents of American impressionism, captured the genteel, privileged life of polite society in the 1890s. A Friendly Call, set in Chase's elegant summer house at Shinnecock Hills, Long Island, shows two fashionably dressed women in a large, airy room decorated with prints, paintings, hanging textiles, and a large, gilt-framed mirror. The artist's wife Alice, on the right, listens attentively to her visitor, who is still wearing her hat and gloves and carrying a parasol.

Chase's rendering of light, his facile brushwork, and his choice of everyday subject matter all recall the work of the French impressionists; yet, unlike his European contemporaries, the artist carefully composed his paintings to underscore abstract elements. Simple rectangular patterns of the floor, wall, and couch are echoed in the framed pictures and wall hangings while they are contrasted to the more curvilinear figures, chair, and plump pillows. The mirror framing Mrs. Chase offers a surprising reflection of a wall behind the viewer; Chase's compositional arrangement and his use of reflected imagery suggest that he may have been paying homage to the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Velázquez, whose much-admired painting Las Meninas displays a similarly inventive studio interior.

[Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 122.5 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Study of Flesh Colour and Gold [1888]

William Merritt Chase - Study of Flesh Colour and Gold [1888] , a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Here Chase applied the pastel relatively densely and with exceptional vigor, maneuvering the coloured crayon as one would a brush loaded with oil paint. In keeping with the contemporary vogue for Japonisme, Chase (like Whistler) adopted Japanese props. He tilted the picture plane and cropped the composition, devices common to Japanese prints. Like Kitagawa Utamaro, whose eighteenth-century prints were coveted by avant-garde artists at the time, Chase focused on the figure’s bare back. But he heightened the effect, to the point of its being somewhat startling, by placing the model in the extreme forefront of the composition, adding a modern sensibility to a traditional Japanese subject.

[Pastel on paper, 45.7 x 33 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Ring Toss [1896]

William Merritt Chase - Ring Toss [1896], a photo by Gandalf's Gallery on Flickr.

Following a spring 1896 visit with his wife and two eldest daughters to Madrid, where he copied Velázquez's Las Meninas (1656) at the Prado, Chase (American, 1849–1916) returned to Shinnecock, Long Island, in June to teach. It was possibly in response to Velázquez's magnum opus that he painted Ring Toss, portraying three of his daughters in his studio engaged in the popular parlour game. Nine-year-old Alice (Cosy) toes a chalked line on the polished hardwood floor; Koto Albertine crouches to retrieve a ring from under a rolling easel; and the youngest child, probably Dorothy, waits her turn. The informal composition, compressed space, sketch like rendering, and dispersed focus reveal Chase's appreciation of candid and trifling narrative and of the suitability of these stylistic devices to "rendering the passing incident of child life," according to a newspaper critic of the time.

[Oil on canvas, 102.6 x 89.2 cm]

William Merritt Chase - Hide And Seek [1888]

William Merritt Chase - Hide And Seek [1888], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

In this work, Chase focuses on a familiar late nineteenth-century theme of children at play. Usually noted for his lavish and exotic interiors, in Hide and Seek Chase emphasised economy of object and understatement of colour; creating a composition that is at once radical and mysterious. Only four objects are included - a chair, a picture or mirror frame, an oriental curtain, and the door jamb or curtain behind which a young girl is hiding while she watches her playmate. We are drawn by the rapt attention of this child while at the same time, our eye moves to the second child, delicately positioned on the diagonal, illuminated by a sliver of light coming from behind the curtain.

The influence of photography can be seen in the unusual cropping in the lower left corner and the surprising expanse of space that dominates this picture. Abandoning a traditional compositional scheme in favour of one that suggests the accidental moment, Chase adopted for himself photography's intimacy and immediacy of expression.

[Oil on canvas, 27⅝ x 35⅞ inches]

William Merritt Chase - The Bayberry Bush [c.1895]

William Merritt Chase - The Bayberry Bush [c.1895], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Myrica Pensylvanica Loisel which is commonly known as the bayberry plant, is a deciduous shrub widely found throughout the eastern and southern parts of the USA. Bayberry belongs to the Myricaceae family and is closely related to the wax myrtle Myrica cerifera Loisel, a larger evergreen shrub or tree also known as southern bayberry. Both species have therapeutic properties and have been in popular use for long. Both plants also produce small bluish white berries. The wax extracted from these berries is used to make the sweet smelling bayberry candles, particularly popular at Christmas time.

A warm concoction made from the root bark of both the species is used as a tonic and has stimulant and astringent properties. It is said to be especially good in the treatment of diarrhoea. Because of its irritating action on the stomach, bayberry bark acts as an emetic when used in large doses. During head colds, the medication is used to increase secretion of nasal mucus and when applied in the form of poultices, it is reputed to be useful in the treatment of chronic indolent ulcers.

William Merritt Chase - A Friendly Call [1895]

William Merritt Chase - A Friendly Call [1895], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

William Merritt Chase (American, 1849 – 1916), an influential art teacher and one of the leading exponents of American impressionism, captured the genteel, privileged life of polite society in the 1890s. A Friendly Call, set in Chase's elegant summer house at Shinnecock Hills, Long Island, shows two fashionably dressed women in a large, airy room decorated with prints, paintings, hanging textiles, and a large, gilt-framed mirror. The artist's wife Alice, on the right, listens attentively to her visitor, who is still wearing her hat and gloves and carrying a parasol.

Chase's rendering of light, his facile brushwork, and his choice of everyday subject matter all recall the work of the French impressionists; yet, unlike his European contemporaries, the artist carefully composed his paintings to underscore abstract elements. Simple rectangular patterns of the floor, wall, and couch are echoed in the framed pictures and wall hangings while they are contrasted to the more curvilinear figures, chair, and plump pillows. The mirror framing Mrs. Chase offers a surprising reflection of a wall behind the viewer; Chase's compositional arrangement and his use of reflected imagery suggest that he may have been paying homage to the seventeenth-century Spanish artist Velázquez, whose much-admired painting Las Meninas displays a similarly inventive studio interior.

[Oil on canvas, 76.5 x 122.5 cm]

William Merritt Chase - The Tenth Street Studio [1880]

William Merritt Chase - The Tenth Street Studio [1880], originally uploaded by Gandalf's Gallery.

Chase (American, 1849–1916), who is almost lost in the shadows at the right, portrays himself holding his palette as if pausing from work, but he leaves it to the viewer to deduce whether the young woman with whom he chats is a model, a patron, or a friend. Her listlessness and immersion in an aesthetic interior make her seem like a precious object, a simile embraced by many artists and collectors of the period. Her association with art reflects women's roles as consumers and keepers of culture and arbiters of taste. Chase encoded his professional ambitions in the opulent décor of his Greenwich Village studio and in his painted accounts of it. Packed with works of art and souvenirs of travel, the studio showcased Chase's refinement and connection with tradition; provided a place for display, contemplation, and professional entertaining; and offered a retreat from urban confusion.

[Oil on canvas, 102.6 x 133.4 cm]

William Merritt Chase - The Lake for Miniature Yachts [c.1888]

The American Impressionists captured the energy and fragmentation of contemporary experience in Paris, Boston, New York, and other cities, often focusing on public parks, which allowed them to portray urban life without confronting urban hardship. Although he usually stressed pastoral charm in his park paintings, Chase (American, 1849–1916) allowed the pavement to dominate this view of the Conservatory Water, a small pond just inside the Fifth Avenue boundary of New York's Central Park, at Seventy-Third Street. He shows Fifth Avenue's rooftops invading the insulating screen of trees that surrounds the park, thus signalling growing challenges to the park's rural fiction. A boy in a fashionable sailor suit striding along at left and an older boy and a well-dressed younger girl at the pond's edge appear as if glimpsed in an instant, quietly pursuing their own interests without any concern for the viewer or for enacting an apparent narrative.

[Oil on canvas, 40.6 x 61 cm]