International studio (60.1916/1917)

William Merritt Chase: his Art and his Influence


SELF-PORTRAIT

BY WM. M. CHASE

alty descended to the children who, like their
mother, were likely to hear at any moment,
“Stand still while I get that.”
Chase’s interest in still life was awakened by
study of the French masters, Chardin and Vollon,
but he evolved a still life technique of his own
and revealed the result to America where still life
was only known as a dull step in the student’s
course. In doing this he did more than present
new subject matter to American students and
painters, he declared a creed of art, for William
Chase, like Whistler, discovered and proved that
beauty is indeed in the eye of the beholder, and
lies therefore in all objects alike, whether the
special subject is a fish, a piece of fabric or a
woman’s face.
The Spanish influence in Chase’s work, a very
perceptible but fugitive quality, is difficult to
impale and label, so essentially is it a thing of the
spirit. It is most obvious in some of his por-
traits and sketches of his wife, whose type con-

tains, among other possibilities, a strongly Span-
ish suggestion. Yet one can trace it in the pose
of a figure not Spanish, as in the portrait of his
daughter, Dorothy, or just in some indefinable
manner or detail of treatment.
The secret that Japanese art unveiled to him
was even more insidious and penetrating in its
effect, a thing of eliminations, pattern, colour
design, and again, that quite indescribable thing
that is the essence of a people’s art. In this day
when Japanese prints of a sort are a common-
place to the shop girl it is difficult for us to
realize that they stood as a veritable entrance
to a new world to the painters of the seventies
and eighties, for we are familiar with their in-
fluence upon modern art.
Nothing in Chase’s painting was more indi-
vidual than his use of colour. While he was able
to manipulate a “riot of colour” with all the
feeling for its sensuous value of the self-declared
colourist he seldom did so. His taste was rather

cvi