William Merritt Chase | Collections | Cheekwood Estate & Gardens in Nashville, TN
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William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase was a painter, teacher and leader of American art in the late 1880s and early 1900s.  As a painter, he was trained at the National Academy of Design in New York and at Munich’s Royal Academy.  He eventurally moved from the Old Master inspired browns of the Munich school to a lighter palette that he discovered during his year-stay in Venice.  His work became more impressionistic as he observed contemporaries John Singer Sargent and James Abbott McNeil Whistler.  Kenyon Cox wrote in the March, 1889, issue of “Harper’s Monthly”, “The first characteristic ofhis work that would strike a stranger to it is probably the versatility and wide range of subject…. The second notable characteristic of his work is the temper of technical experiment in which it is executed.  Its subjects are not more varied than are its means of expression.”

Chase was the leading American art teacher of his generation.  He taught for nearly 40 years in school’s like the Art Students’ League of New York and his own Chase School of Art (founded in 1896), teaching hundreds of artists, including modernist painters Georgia O’Keeffe and Joseph Stella.  His students received direction to continue in the traditional mode of art, which consisted of conservative subjects of the past with fresh color and paint handling.

In addition to his teaching duties, Chase was a National Academician in the National Academy of Design, a member of the Ten American Painters, and presided over the Society of American Artists for ten years.  He died in his home in New York in 1916, yet continued to influence some of the greated painters of the twentieth century.
(Williamsburg, Indiana, 1849 – 1916, New York)
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