Part 12

He was eager to learn and susceptible to impression--so much so that he was said to have followed at different times Leibl, Stevens, Rico, Fortuny, Whistler; but the things which Chase followed were minor matters of handling or arrangement and did not affect his personal point of view. They were superficial fancies and were soon merged, fused, or abandoned. Some of the old masters, Velasquez, Titian, Hals, Rembrandt, had a stronger influence upon him, but these men he never tried to follow. It was their high artistic plane that gave him inspiration. Standing before Titian’s “Young Englishman” in the Pitti, his admiration for its superb poise and lofty dignity was unbounded. It was faultless and flawless intellectually and technically. The left eye was out of drawing, but Titian intended it so. It gave the face more character. He never even wanted to suspect that the restorer in the cleaning-room was perhaps responsible for the bad drawing of the eye. Titian was above criticism.

Chase was never mean in his enthusiasms. He loved whole-heartedly. Before Velasquez at Madrid everything was just as it should be. He was the greatest of them all--the master craftsman of the craft; in the Louvre he protested that no one had ever equalled or approached such still-life painting as that of Chardin; at Haarlem he was just as unstinted in praise of Frans Hals. And he was right about them all. He was a very good judge of pictures and picked out no questionable masters for admiration. Where he found a great masterpiece in a gallery, there he unslung his kit, sat down, and made a copy. He at different times produced very remarkable copies of Velasquez, Hals, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ribera, Watteau. Whatever past art had to teach, Chase was eager to learn. He kept a receptive mind and a live interest in all phases of painting, and had more inherent knowledge of craftsmanship than any of his contemporaries. The literary history of art he knew nothing about, and probably could not have told within a hundred years when Velasquez or Hals was born. That side of art has small interest for artists, and for Chase it was more or less of a blank space.

His summer trips to Europe began in 1881, when he went to Paris and Madrid, making in the latter city a copy of the “Tapestry Weavers.” The next year he was again in Spain with Blum and Vinton. At that time Madrid was a great place for brass, pictures, stuffs, curios, and Chase bought without stint. He needed materials for still-life pictures and, besides, the big Tenth Street studio absorbed no end of furnishings. The summer of 1883 found him in Holland, living at Zandvoort with Blum, and painting Blum in a large garden-picture called “The Tiff.” In 1885 he went to see Whistler in London. They started out on terms of mutual admiration, painted each other’s portraits, travelled in Holland together, but finally ended up by quarrelling. The Whistler portrait of Chase has disappeared, or at least its whereabouts, if it still exists, is unknown; but the Chase portrait of Whistler is extant and now in the Metropolitan Museum. Whistler declared it “a monstrous lampoon,” and he was about right in saying so. It is Whistler the _poseur_, not the real man. Certain eccentricities or personal peculiarities were so extravagantly presented that the characterization became little less than caricature.

In 1886 Chase was married to Miss Gerson and for a few years the European trips were abandoned. He was still teaching in the League, was president of the Society of American Artists, and was holding exhibitions of his work at the Boston Art Club and elsewhere. He began doing some open-air pastels in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. A small club called the “Painters in Pastel” had been organized in New York with Blum as president, and Chase, Beckwith, La Farge, Twachtman, Weir, Wiles as members. Chase became interested in the gay color-possibilities of the medium and proceeded to apply it to park scenes with children, flowers, water, and trees. Years before, Alfred Stevens had told him that his Munich scheme of light was too dark and Chase immediately began to lighten it. Perhaps the medium of pastel finally drove out the last vestige of Munich, for certainly his open-air pictures, without suggesting _pointillisme_ or impressionism or optical mixture of any kind, took on very light and brilliant colorings. They were charming expositions of color and sunlight, and were regarded at the time as something of a departure.

His works in oil measurably responded to the newly discovered brightness of his pastels, but they were always somewhat lower in key. Something of Munich method clung to his portraits even into the nineties. The “Lady in Black” (a portrait of Mrs. Leslie Cotton) in the Metropolitan Museum is an illustration to the point. It is excellent if somewhat sombre portraiture. Both Chase and Sargent painted Carmencita, the dancer, in 1890, Sargent’s picture being now in the Luxembourg and Chase’s in the Metropolitan Museum. The Chase shows very well his illumination, his color scheme, his drawing, and his brush-work at that time. Without radically changing them, he varied them from year to year to an extent that might almost be called a new manner or style. He was always changing, as became a painter who counted his education as never complete while he lived.

He was widely known at this time through many pictures in annual exhibitions and by separate exhibitions of his works, as, for instance, that at Buffalo in 1891. The Academy of Design had overcome what prejudices against him it may have had and elected him to membership, he had started teaching in Brooklyn, and the same year his idea of a summer art school at Shinnecock, Long Island, came to realization. A house and studio, a class and a cottage colony were all started and completed out there in the sand-dunes by the sea, and one of the most picturesque art schools in America was soon under way. It was then and there that Chase did perhaps his best teaching and painted his best work not only in landscape, shore piece, and marine, but in portraiture, genre, and still-life. The portrait of his mother, done at Shinnecock, was almost certainly inspired by the fine early Rembrandt of an aged woman in the National Gallery, and yet there is hardly a line of resemblance that can be traced. The Chase portrait is very sober, serious, almost severe in its white cap and black silk dress. It has no flourish of brush nor flare of color, and, like the Whistler portrait of his mother, seems to have more fine feeling about it than any other portrait of his that comes to mind. This, one can imagine, came about in both cases because the subjects were intimately known to the painters, and their appearances had been under long reflection before either painter put brush to canvas.

It was perhaps a shortcoming of Chase’s art that he insisted upon merely seeing his subject and not thinking about it. The appearance to him was everything, the reflection or thought about it nothing. Yet the pictures of his that people like best are the ones where some thinking was done. The mother portrait is the instance just given, and better still than that perhaps is the “Woman with a White Shawl,” now in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The latter is beautifully drawn and painted, rightly placed on the canvas, true in values, technically as nearly right as anything Chase ever did, but, oddly enough, one does not think of it technically nor regard it at first decoratively. It is the fine humanity of it--the eternal womanly--that catches the fancy. It is the portrait of a sensitive, refined American woman--in a way the ideal of a type that every American has seen or at some time has known about. Chase, with all his talk about dealing with surfaces only, sometimes talked the other way and expanded on character. He knew the paint-brush could go beneath the surface, for his own brush occasionally brought up astonishing results. The “Woman with a White Shawl” in its fine sympathy and inherent refinement of character may be regarded as Chase’s high-water mark in portraiture. His portraits of men like those of Louis Windmuller, Dean Grosvenor, Robert Underwood Johnson, hardly reach up to it. They lack interest.

At the same time with the “Woman with a White Shawl” he did the “Alice,” now in the Chicago Art Institute--a young girl with a ribbon thrown back of her shoulders almost like a skipping-rope. But this is just the ordinary Chase--that is, an excellent and well-drawn and rightly painted girl of twelve moving across the room with a smiling, somewhat unintelligent, face. The only thinking that Chase put in this picture was in regard to the action or movement of the figure. The rest was merely so much still-life painted for its surface texture as one might paint a brass bucket or the scales of a fish. And yet the “Alice” is an excellent picture and exhibits Chase’s theory of art quite perfectly. But it also demonstrates the truth that the sum of art does not lie on the surface, that the model alone is possibly not sufficient in itself to make up the highest kind of pictorial beauty, and that the intellectual and emotional nature of the painter is a potent factor in all great art. Chase at heart knew that. Titian’s portraits had convinced him of it years before.

[Illustration: “The Woman with the White Shawl,” by William Merritt Chase.

In the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.]

Honors, prizes, and medals were coming to him, his teaching was very successful, he had a large following, and was thought the most considerable of our art leaders; but beneath the surface all was not so placid or so pleasant. In 1895 he was no longer president of the Society, he gave up his Brooklyn class, and also his Tenth Street studio. Artistic extravagance or want of revenue or some other financial disability had placed him in straitened circumstances. All of his pictures and collections had to be sold to pay his debts. With characteristic indifference he gave a farewell dinner in the big studio before leaving it, gathered together what possessions remained to him in a house in Stuyvesant Square, and shortly thereafter, with his family and a number of pupils, went to Spain.

In June he returned to Shinnecock, and in the autumn took a studio at Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, and opened at Fifty-seventh Street the Chase School. This school soon became the New York School of Art, and Chase was at its head for eleven years. He also went on teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, going over to Philadelphia every week for the purpose. Then for half a dozen years he taught and painted at Shinnecock with little travel interspersed. It was during these years that he did the “Grey Kimono” and the “Red Box,” portraits arranged with Japanese accessories that showed brilliant coloring, swift handling, and rather superficial characterization. There was none of the Japanese spirit or even method about them. Then, too, he did many shore pieces and views of the sea with the Shinnecock dunes in the foreground. In these pictures he often placed in the first plane small children in white, with a note of color in hats or ribbons, or a reading woman with a bright parasol. The bright spots of color lent brilliancy of effect and the white dresses gave a high pitch of light. They were very attractive pictures, and some of the seas put in the backgrounds had notes of power about them; but usually the product was merely a handsome decorative pattern--just what the painter intended it should be.

Occasionally, too, while at Shinnecock, Chase painted views of the sea, unadorned or unalloyed by beach or shore or people, that were very effective in wave movement and color. He had a finer feeling for color and texture than Winslow Homer but he never had Homer’s grasp of power. In his studio at Shinnecock he painted portraits, genre, and still-life--some of the last being fish. Here, in still-life, with his cunning handling and with color and texture as the chief motive, he appeared to great advantage. By many people his fish-painting is regarded as his highest achievement. In no less than half a dozen museums in the United States he is represented by still-life pictures in which the bulk, the weight, the limpness of dead fish are convincingly shown, but where perhaps greater emphasis is thrown on the slippery wet surfaces with their iridescent colorings. A few years before he died, in showing a new fish-picture in his studio he remarked to me with some deprecation in his manner that he supposed after he was gone he would be known as a fish-painter! He had made the same protest to others.

[Illustration: “Afternoon at Peconic,” by William Merritt Chase.]

A short trip to London was taken in 1902. His pupils had asked him to sit to Sargent for his portrait and he did so. The portrait was afterward given to the Metropolitan Museum, where it now hangs. Chase greatly admired Sargent’s sureness and facility and often referred his students to Sargent’s portraits for their study. He was always generous in recognition of good work, even where perhaps he did not like the worker’s point of view, as with Boldini, for example. Sargent and Boldini could outfoot him on his own ground, but that did not matter. He could still cheer for them.

It was during 1902 that Chase conceived the remarkable idea of not only going to Europe himself for the summer months but taking with him his entire class of students. The first contingent went with him to Holland, and at Haarlem one night at dinner he gave me an account of the venture and its success. His pupils had not only profited by foreign scene and museum but he had taken them to see certain well-known painters in their studios and shown them the modern methods of painting. The next year he took the class to England, located it on Hampstead Heath, and introduced it at the studios of Sargent, Abbey, Lavery, Alma-Tadema, Shannon. The year of 1905 the class was in Madrid and after that for a number of years in Florence. Chase bought a villa in Florence, but apparently it was little more than a storehouse for objects of art which he was still collecting. He spent much time at Venice, and both there and at Florence would take his pupils to the great galleries and point out to them what was excellent in the old masters. It was a new method of art teaching and satisfactory results came from it.

Chase’s winters had been spent in New York and he kept moving in both his habitations and his occupations. He left the Fifth Avenue studio for a large rambling place on Fourth Avenue, where rooms opened into rooms, and where he continued painting people and fish. He again took up teaching at the Art Students League, sent pictures to the International Exhibition at Berlin, held an exhibition of his own at Cincinnati, went to California where he had a summer school at Carmel-by-the-Sea, served as a member of the Panama-Pacific Exposition jury. His energy and his interest were unflagging. He painted and taught and talked, he came and went and came again, as no other painter in American art-history. His industry alone would command respect. Even when he fell into his final illness and was taken to Atlantic City for change of air he had canvases and brushes packed and sent with him. He might be able to paint down there. At the last, when too weak to read, it pleased him to go over, with his wife, all the beautiful pictures they had seen together and compare their likings. His enthusiasm was always something to be remembered; and when in October, 1916, he died, there was a pronounced feeling in art circles that not only a torch-bearer, but a devoted lover of art had gone on.

There was nothing complicated or hidden or mysterious about either Chase or his art. He frankly stated his aim, faith, and practice more than once and adhered to his beliefs for more than forty years. He cared nothing about theories or philosophies or ideals and was not led off by realism, impressionism, or cubism. He talked much on art, not only to his classes but to miscellaneous audiences; but he indulged in no metaphysical flights and spoke a language that all could understand. As a practical painter his primary concern was with the ability to paint. The picture should be technically and mechanically a good piece of workmanship. The grammar of art first, and what you may have to say with it afterward. At times he intimated that things, by no means technical, could be said with the paint-brush, as, for example, this utterance: “The value of a work of art depends simply and solely on the height of inspiration, on the greatness of soul, of the man who produced it.” But, generally speaking, Chase cared not too much for “soul” in art and produced little of it in his own pictures. His creed of painting was better stated in another sentence. “The essential phases of a great picture are three in number, namely: truth, interesting treatment, and quality.” By truth he meant that the picture should give the impression of a thing well seen. By interesting treatment he meant verve, spirit, enthusiasm, the interest of the artist--an interest which should express itself in his manner of treatment. Regarding this he continued:

“To my mind, one of the simplest explanations of this matter of technique is to say that it is the eloquence of art. When a speaker has the gift of fine oratory we hang upon his words and gestures, we are spellbound by his intensity and his style, no matter on what subject he chooses to address us. I fear some people confuse technique with the use of a slashing brush and big rough strokes of paint. Let me refer them to the works of the Primitives or to Holbein, whose calm surfaces show us one of the world’s greatest masters of the technical side of art.”[13]

[13] “Notes from Talks by William M. Chase” in _The American Magazine of Art_, September, 1917.

It will be noted that Chase in his pertinent likeness of painting to oratory eliminates the content or thing said and puts the art and the oratory all in the manner of saying. And therein he is perhaps right so far as the matter can be separated from the manner. He puts the subject aside as one might say there is no poetry in Darwin, nothing æsthetic or artistic, though he says much of great value, whereas there is poetry in Swinburne though it is often difficult to find out whether he is saying anything at all or merely putting out a pretty run or rhythm of language. It was a pretty run of the brush that Chase fancied above everything else.

“Subject is not important. Anything can be made attractive. Not long ago I painted a pipe, a loaf, and a bowl of milk.... I would not be unwilling to rest my reputation on it.... Let your brush sweep freely. Better to lose it than to give way to timidity which soon becomes a habit.... Better be dashingly bad and interesting.”[14]

[14] _Ibid._

It was thus he talked to his pupils trying to convince them that art lay in an enthusiastic individual manner. He believed that--believed that the art of painting lay in clever manipulation, in gusto, in manual dexterity. But that did not mean a slashing about at haphazard with a heavily loaded brush.

“Too many are hurrying on to give what is called ‘finish’ before they have grounded their work in the truth which must inform and uphold the entire structure.... Digest the subject fully before beginning. See it fully done and well done--perhaps as some special painter whose work you admire would do it. To begin to paint without deciding fully what your sketch is to be, would be like a lecturer beginning to talk before knowing what he was going to say.”[15]

[15] _Ibid._

Now that is excellent doctrine and Chase himself followed it in his own practice. In 1890 I sat to him for a portrait and I recall his saying then before he put brush to the canvas: “I try to see you on the canvas all finished and then I start in to paint you as I see you in my mind.” Later on in the painting he was fussed by the collar being askew; he damned it, said it was not rightly seen or drawn, scraped it out and did it over again. He was concerned about getting a certain amount of realistic truth as well as easy brush-work, and talked much about the right seeing of the model. But there was a contradiction in temperament just here that came in to invalidate his aim only too often.

Enthusiasm is usually impatient of delay or restraint; it is always eager for action. Yet one cannot fully understand even so obvious an object as the model on the stand without reflection. It must be seen and thought over and contemplated before one takes up the brush. Nothing very great comes from dashing down on canvas something seen for an instant only. But Chase, in spite of his talk, was not one who reflected long or had the contemplative mind. He seldom fell into a revery or lost himself in a labyrinth of thought. He had virtuosity and was an _improvisateur_. The lilt and fling of his work were brilliant in the extreme; and it is perhaps foolish to criticise it because lacking in thought or reflection, and yet that is the comment oftenest heard regarding it. His pictures are declared to have neither depth of feeling nor depth of thought, and the works that are accounted his best are the exceptions that prove the rule.

It has been noted also that Chase’s paintings were never very elaborate in composition. He did nothing of a historical or academic nature--nothing even in figure-painting beyond two or three figures. Putting figures together with line and light, in plane and pattern, perhaps called for too much reflection. It was easier to place a model in a kimono against a screen or to arrange a fish in a plate or on a table, or to put together a pipe, a loaf, and a bowl. He was in a hurry to get at the canvas, and wanted none of the enthusiasm to evaporate. Just so with his color scheme. He would not think over it until he could feel it swell like a symphony, but instead put in unconsidered colors that were perhaps agreeable enough in themselves, and then added a dash of sharp red to catch the eye and make the picture “sing.” But it was usually a common enough song that it sang. Distinction of color is not obtained by merely arranging studio properties on canvas. Some instinct and a good deal of feeling go to the making of the finest color projects. So, again, we find that perhaps the common objection to Chase’s color that it has no quality is more or less well-founded.