William Merritt Chase
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Individual Artists
William Merritt Chase Details
Praised for his jewel-like landscapes, park scenes, and sympathetic images of women, William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) was a leading American Impressionist painter and an influential teacher in the late 19th century. This beautifully illustrated volume provides a compact introduction to Chase’s paintings and pastels and samples several of his favorite motifs, including the theatrical environment of his antique-filled studio, the modern women he celebrated, the costumes and decorative arts of Japan, children at play in city and countryside, and thoughtful moments of leisure and contemplation. A native of the state of Indiana, Chase left his modest boyhood home to study at the Munich Academy, where he both fell in love with the old masters and became determined to celebrate the people and places of his own time. His studio became a stage set for his imagination, where objects from around the world came together in harmonious arrangements of color and form, and where subjects and patrons alike were dazzled by both his paintings and his artistic persona.
Reviews
Late nineteenth-century Americans looked to Europe to add to their art collections and have their portraits painted. When William Merritt Chase came on the scene, he proved that America could produce its own superlative artists.This book shows how Chase influenced the course of American art history. It also presents him as a likable family man, a progressive thinker on art and social issues, and an important art teacher whose pupils (like Edward Hopper and Georgia O'Keeffe) went on to achieve fame.Chase created a truly American brand of Impressionism. This book shows how he, like the Impressionists, captured the "modern" world of his time --- the new independent spirit of women, for example, and new ideas about the value of leisure.One chapter is devoted to the artist's remarkable studio in New York, which was a work of art in itself. There's a chapter on how the craze for all things Japanese infiltrated Chase's work, and a chapter on his paintings of children at play. (As the father of nine children, he was not short of models).The reproductions are sharp and vivid, and illustrate almost every page. Individual works are discussed within the text, not separately in the back of the book. The text is full of interesting information about the paintings.I ordered this book in preparation for the exhibition at the Boston Fine Arts Museum starting October 9, 2016. This is an MFA publication, but probably not an actual catalog of the exhibit. In the Acknowledgements, the author mentions a more comprehensive book, William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master, from Yale University Press, which sounds like the actual catalog. But this slender volume is well written, nicely designed, and a very useful introduction to Chase.
