Summer Afternoons: Landscape Paintings of William Merritt Chase
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,History & Criticism
Summer Afternoons: Landscape Paintings of William Merritt Chase Details
Born in Indiana in 1849, William Merritt Chase, along with Whistler, Cassatt, and Sargent, is recognized today as one of America's premier Impressionist painters. Chase's formative years spanned a period of great change in American painting - a time when eager young artists, trained in the academies, found inspiration both in Europe and, gradually, in their own country. Chase often traveled abroad; unlike many of his contemporaries, he also chose to portray the natural beauty of America, often in city parks and simple beach scenes rather than idealized bucolic vistas.Although for at least a half century after his death Chase was better known for his still lifes and figure paintings, now his landscapes come to light as some of his most beautiful and skilled works. They are at once the most impressionistic of his works and the most American - an important attribute for this man who was an influential educator on the art of his own country, and who, at a ball in Bruges, Belgium, bedecked with all the medals he had won over the years, proudly proclaimed himself "Duke of Indiana."Most celebrated among Chase's American scenes were the Prospect Park and Central Park paintings and the Long Island landscapes. Writing about Chase in Harper's New Monthly in 1889, and objecting to the overriding preference for European subjects among American artists and collectors, one critic described Chase's urban scenes as "new proof, if proof were wanted, that it is not subjects that are lacking in this country, but eyes to see them with."The eighty-eight full-color reproductions of Chase's landscape paintings and pastels in his book go beyond his American scenes. Spanning the years 1875 to 1914, from Chase's early days in Munich to his summer in Carmel-by-the-Sea, the book is full of different locales, all rendered in Chase's adored plein air style. Here is Madrid, Holland, Fiesole, and Venice; later, on to the city parks and the beaches, and finally the California paintings. The text is by Ronald Pisano, the foremost authority on Chase, and is supplemented by documentary photographs from Chase's life and his various working environments.These oils and pastels are pictures of ease, of relaxation; in their portrayal of leisure-class Americans, they are intimate and restrained, but are the work of a consummately talented colorist and an artist fascinated by aesthetic technique. "If one can paint a fence-rail well," Chase once said in defense of his Long Island paintings, "it is far better than an unsuccessful attempt at the most sublime scenery, for it is not what one does, but the way it is done."
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