William Merritt Chase

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Self-portrait , 1915

William Merritt Chase (born November 1, 1849 in Williamsburg, today Niniveh , Indiana , United States , † October 25, 1916 in New York ) was an American portrait and landscape painter . After a long stay in Europe , especially in Munich and Venice , he began to develop his own American impressionism and was very successful with it. During his lifetime he was considered "the American Impressionist" and was one of the most influential visual artists and art teachers in the USA of his generation.

Life

Early years and training in Munich

William Merritt Chase was the eldest son of the ladies' shoemaker and salesman David Hester Chase and his wife Sarah Swaim Chase and had five younger siblings. When he was twelve years old, the family moved to Indianapolis , where he would follow his father in his profession. But Chase wanted to be a painter and draftsman.

In 1867 he began his artistic training with Barton S. Hays and Jacob Cox, who worked as painters in Indianapolis . After a brief period in the US Navy , Chase was accepted at the National Academy of Design in New York City in 1869 and continued his studies with teachers Joseph Oriel Eaton and Lemuel P. Wilmarth , a student of the well-known French Jean-Léon Gérôme .

In 1871 Chase went to St. Louis , where his family now lived, and worked in the family business. He became known to local patrons through several exhibitions in which he presented his still lifes . They offered him to undertake a trip to Europe financed by you. Chase accepted the offer and went to Europe for two years to continue his studies there. In the same year he exhibited for the first time at the National Academy of Arts in Washington, DC .

First he traveled to Munich and studied at the local Academy of Fine Arts . Here he first came into contact with the painting style of the European Old Masters, in particular the art of Frans Hals and Anthonis van Dyck . His teachers were mainly Alexander von Wagner and Karl von Piloty and he met two other Americans, Frank Duveneck and John Henry Twachtman , with whom he stayed in Venice for nine months in 1877 . In Munich, his admiration was mainly for the painters Wilhelm von Diez , Hugo von Habermann and Wilhelm Leibl as representatives of the naturalism inspired by Gustave Courbet . With his Keying Up - the Court Jester , painted in Munich in 1875 and shown at the World Exhibition in Philadelphia in 1876 , he won a medal and thus achieved his first international fame.

Fame as a teacher: New York and Shinnecock Hills

Chase house in Shinnecock

In 1878, Chase returned to New York and moved into his studio in the 10th Street Studio Building, which became one of America's most famous artist studios. He taught at the newly founded Art Students League of New York from 1878 to 1896 and later again from 1907 to 1911. In addition, he taught at the Chase School of Art , which he founded himself , the Brooklyn Art Association and from 1896 to 1909 until 1907 at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts . His painting in gray and brown tones, which he had developed in Munich, as well as the interspersed sharp color accents represented the most progressive and freest painting style for America at the time. At the same time, these pictures offered a transition from classic American art to the mood of modernity.

In 1891 Chase founded the Shinnecock Hills Summer School in the village of Shinnecock Hills near Southampton on Long Island , where he taught until 1902. This summer school in particular became known nationwide and led to the establishment of the local artist colony , the focus of which was Chase. Southampton and the Shinnecock Hills had become a popular summer destination for wealthy New Yorkers since 1868, thanks to their accessibility via the Southside Railroad Line . In the same year as the summer school, the Shinnecock Hills Golf Club and a little later the first-class hotel Shinnecock Inn were opened there.

The Chase Homestead, Shinnecock , 1893

Chase was persuaded by several wealthy summer guests to take over the founding and management of the school - they themselves provided land and funds for the construction. The focus of the summer school was the Art Village, surrounded by several courtyards and inns, in which interested guests could rent. Chase himself got his own house a short distance from the Village in 1892 and recorded this in his impressionist painting The Chase Homestead, Shinnecock 1893 (his daughter Dorothy is also shown in the painting, picking flowers at the driveway to the house). From 1891 to 1902, Chase taught about 1,000 summer school students, mostly richer women from New York who had previously painted as amateurs. However, there were also some more prominent students, all of them Edmund Graecen , who also lived and worked in Giverny and Old Lyme , Rockwell Kent , Charles Sheeler , Howard Chandler Christy , Annie T. Lang , Joseph Stella , Charles W. Hawthorne and Katherine Budd . The school focused entirely on plein-air painting , and students worked outdoors from morning to evening to capture their impressions on canvas.

Alongside his rival Robert Henri , Chase was considered to be the most important teacher of painting in the United States at the turn of the 20th century. Through students from California, including above all Arthur Frank Mathews , Xavier Martínez and Percy Gray , he also had a great influence on the development of art in California. His students also included women like Dora Wheeler , Rosina Emmet, and Lydia Field Emmet, and famous painters such as Georgia O'Keeffe , Charles Demuth , Marsden Hartley, and Edward Hopper .

Family life and commitment

John Singer Sargent : Portrait by William Merritt Chase, oil on canvas, 1902

Along with many artists of his generation, Chase was a critic of the conservative National Academy of Design , of which he was elected in 1890, and a founding member of the Society of American Artists , of which he was president from 1885 to 1895. In 1898 he was accepted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters . He was also a member of the Tilers, which also included Winslow Homer , Arthur Quartley and Augustus Saint Gaudens . Chase was also one of the first to campaign for the purchase of paintings by Édouard Manet and El Greco for American museums.

In 1886 Chase married Alice Gerson, with whom he had eight children in the following years. Both his wife and children were regularly portrayed by him. Chase worked as a painter and teacher at the same time with great energy and established his studio ( studio ) as a well-known meeting place for the fashion-conscious members of the New York art scene of his time. He took over this studio from Albert Bierstadt and designed it as a gallery for his own pictures. Chase furnished the rooms in great detail with valuable furniture, stuffed birds, rare and exotic musical instruments and oriental carpets. In 1895, however, he closed the studio again because the maintenance costs were too high.

In 1902 Chase took the place vacated by the death of John Henry Twachtman in the Ten American Painters association . Although his creativity waned and he could not keep up with the new modernism that was becoming popular in America, he painted and taught until the 1910s. His last class was in Carmel-by-the-Sea , California , in the summer of 1914 , where Shinnecock's summer classes had moved that year. William Merritt Chase died on October 25, 1916 at his home in New York City.

The Parrish Art Museum in Water Mill on Long Island east of New York City features one of the artist's largest public collections of paintings and works on paper.

Works

William Merritt Chase created well over 1,000 works, mainly oil paintings, but also pastels and works in other techniques. While he preferred a dark, toned color selection based on Leibl's example, especially during his time in Munich and the years thereafter, his palette showed increasingly lighter and more colorful tones over the years. In the summer courses in particular, he used colors mixed with white to brighten his pictures.

His earliest works were still lifes. He took up this subject again and again in later years. Decorative objects, which he used as picture objects, filled his studio and apartment; he also designed his interior paintings with arrangements of objects. Especially food and especially dead fish appear regularly in these pictures.

Another genre that he used regularly was portraits. He painted some of the most famous people of his time as well as their wives and children. His wife and children were also a regular motif in his pictures, and he often used them as pictorial elements in landscapes. He often depicted the people in a seated position. He also depicted them in landscapes or showed them in scenes of their private lives. In 1885, for example, he painted his colleague and friend James McNeill Whistler and his wife Dora, in return he was portrayed by Whistler. Especially in the later years of life, the portraits increased compared to other genres.

His most famous pictures include his landscapes, which have earned him a reputation as an American impressionist. He didn't begin landscape painting until the late 1880s, with his interest in the genre likely being sparked by the first major exhibition of French Impressionist paintings in New York City in 1886. He preferred city motifs on the one hand, such as Prospect Park , Brooklyn or Central Park in New York, and on the other hand the summer landscapes in Shinnecock . He often placed people in his landscapes, who were shown sitting on a park bench or taking a walk, for example. Children playing also appear regularly in his pictures.

Individual evidence

  1. ^ A b Francis Morrone: Walks through old New York: Historical paintings, postcards, photographs and city maps . Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-8094-2455-0 , p. 20.
  2. ↑ Danielle Ganek: The Summer We Read Gatsby . New York 2010, ISBN 978-3-442-47485-1 , p. 224.
  3. ^ Nationalacademy.org: Past Academicians "C" ( Memento from March 20, 2016 in the Internet Archive ) (accessed March 24, 2015)
  4. ^ Members: William Merritt Chase. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed February 22, 2019 .
  5. ^ Francis Morrone: Walks through Old New York: Historical Paintings, Postcards, Photographs and City Maps . Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-8094-2455-0 , p. 21.

literature

  • Götz Czymmek (Hrsg.): Landscape in the light. Impressionist painting in Europe and North America 1860–1910. Exhibition catalog of the Wallraf-Richartz-Museum in Cologne and the Kunsthaus Zürich. 1990.
  • Barbara Drayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase: William Merritt Chase . Smithsonian Institution, New York City 1995.
  • Stephan Koja: America. The New World in 19th Century Pictures. Prestel-Verlag, 1999, ISBN 3-7913-2051-3 .
  • Deborah Epstein Solon: Colonies of American Impressionism. Laguna Art Museum, Laguna Beach 1999, ISBN 0-940872-24-2 .
  • Carolyn Kinder Carr: Chase, William Merritt. Oxford University Press, 2007. Grove Art Online, access required
  • Keith L. Bryant: Chase, William Merritt. 2000. American National Biography Online, access required
  • A. Neumeyer: Chase, William Merritt. In: Germain Bazin , Horst Karl Gerson , Lawrence Gowing a . a. (Ed.): Kindler's Malereilexikon. Volumes 1–6, Kindler-Verlag, Zurich 1964–1971.

Web links

Commons : William Merritt Chase  - Collection of Images, Videos and Audio Files
personal data
SURNAME Chase, William Merritt
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American portrait and landscape painter
DATE OF BIRTH November 1, 1849
PLACE OF BIRTH Williamsburg, Indiana , USA
DATE OF DEATH October 25, 1916
Place of death New York City , USA