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William Merritt Chase

American, 1849 - 1916

Birth-PlaceNineveh, IN

Death-PlaceNew York, NY

BiographyWilliam Merritt Chase (1849-1916)

William Merritt Chase was born in Williamsburg, Indiana, and moved with his family to Indianapolis in 1861. He led an uneventful childhood, helping his father in his shoe store after school and taking drawing lessons from a schoolteacher and, later, from local professional artist Barton S. Hays.

In 1869 Chase moved to New York, where he studied privately with Joseph Oriel Eaton and enrolled at the National Academy of Design. Lack of funds forced him to leave school and he went to Saint Louis, where his family had recently moved, to establish himself professionally. His fortunes took a positive turn in 1871 when his entries in the Eleventh Saint Louis Fair won two awards and attracted the attention of businessman W. R. Hodges. Impressed by Chase’s potential, Hodges and some of his friends gave the young artist a two-year stipend, enabling him to travel to Europe for additional training.

Chase arrived in England in summer 1872. After brief periods in London and Paris, he enrolled in Munich’s highly respected Royal Academy. There he developed close friendships with fellow Midwesterners Frank Duveneck and Walter Shirlaw. The combination of training under Alexander von Wagner and Karl von Piloty at the Academy, exposure to Old Master paintings in local collections, and acquaintance with the circle of artists headed by realist Wilhelm Leibl wrought tremendous changes in Chase’s art. His previously tight brushwork was transformed into a painterly fluidity, his palette deepened, and his subject matter expanded, reflecting the realist concerns of Leibl.

In 1877 Chase embarked on a nine-month stay in Venice with Duveneck and John Henry Twachtman. He returned to Munich briefly before sailing for New York in 1878 to join the staff of the Art Students League. This appointment was the beginning of an impressive teaching career, which included positions at the Art Students League (1878-96; 1907-11); the Brooklyn Art Association (1887; 1891-96); and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts (1896-1909). Most important was his own Shinnecock School of Art on Long Island, where he conducted classes in the summers of 1891 to 1902. In 1896 he founded the Chase School of Art in New York (renamed the New York School of Art in 1898), where he taught steadily until 1907. From 1903 to 1913 he took groups of students to Europe almost annually, often using his villa near Florence as a base.

Even before the end of his long European sojourn in the 1870s, products of Chase’s Munich studies gained him fame in the United States. “Keying Up: The Court Jester” (1875; Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia) won a medal of honor at the 1876 Centennial Exhibition in Philadelphia. This notoriety as well as his participation in the first exhibition of the Society of American Artists in 1877 identified him with progressive trends in American art. Chase’s lifelong association with advanced aesthetics was perpetuated by his presidency of the Society of American Artists (1880; 1885-95); his activity in the Society of Painters in Pastel; and his role as a promoter of contemporary European art. He was coorganizer of the 1883 Pedestal Fund Art Loan Exhibition, and in 1905 he joined The Ten, filling the vacancy left by the death of Twachtman. Despite such liberal affiliations, Chase also maintained his association with the more conservative National Academy of Design, where he was elected to full membership in 1890.

Chase was especially noted for his distinctive personal style. Always elegantly dressed, he worked diligently to create a public persona that would elevate the status of the artist in American society. His large studio in the Tenth Street Studio building was famous as a place of art production and as a haven for study. The studio, which housed his ever-growing collection of exotic objects, paintings, and furniture, was the subject of an important series of paintings. In the 1880s Chase turned to scenes of city parks, first in Brooklyn and, later, in Manhattan. These sparkling light-filled canvases, though painted in an Impressionist mode, gratified critics because of their undeniably American subject matter.
In 1886 Chase married Alice Gerson and the couple had nine children, all of whom modeled for their father, appearing in portraits, genre scenes, and his famed views of the Shinnecock landscape.

Despite his constant teaching activity and his critical success, Chase was always short of funds, due to his large family, elaborate studios, and unrestrained spending in amassing his collections. The closing of his Tenth Street studio and the auction of its contents in 1896 did little to offset his financial problems, which probably prompted his increased activity in portrait and still-life painting in the 1890s.

Chase died in New York, probably from cancer of the liver. The recipient of many national and international awards over his lifetime, he was accorded a large memorial exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1917.

John Butler Talcott, ca. 1900
Oil on canvas, 48 x 36 in. (121.9 x 91.4 cm)
Signed (lower right): W • M • Chase •
Gift of the Talcott Family (1943.03)

The segment of Chase’s output that has received the least attention is portraiture, including the sizeable group of portraits of men that he executed throughout his career.1 (1) These works break down roughly into depictions of his own sons, self-portraits, portraits of artist colleagues, uncommissioned “exhibition” pieces, and commissioned works, many of which were official in nature and executed from the mid-1890s on. It is into this last division that the portrait of John Butler Talcott falls.

Talcott, born in Enfield, Connecticut, on September 4, 1824, was the son of Seth and Charlotte Butler Talcott. The family was prominent in New England history, beginning with John Talcott, who arrived in the colonies in 1636 and settled in Hartford.2 (2) John Butler Talcott was raised there and educated in the local schools.3 (3) After graduating from Yale College in 1846, he divided his time between preparing for a career in law, teaching Latin at the Hartford Female Seminary, and tutoring Greek at Middlebury and Yale Colleges. Although he passed the bar in 1848, he seems not to have actively practiced law and by 1851 was the business partner of Seth J. North in New Britain, manufacturing knitwear and hooks and eyes. In 1868 he founded the American Hosiery Company, of which he was president at his death. Over the years Talcott emerged as one of New Britain’s leading businessmen and employers. He also served in various capacities for local companies, including P. and F. Corbin, Corbin Cabinet Lock Company, New Britain Savings Bank, and Connecticut General Life Insurance Company of Hartford.

Talcott married Jane C. Goodwin in 1848. Two years after her death in 1878, he took Fannie H. Hazen as his second wife. At his death he was survived by his wife, his son George (from his first marriage), and two daughters, Florence and Helen.

Talcott’s contributions to the civic life of New Britain were notable. In addition to serving as a member of the city’s Common Council and Board of Aldermen, he was elected to two mayoral terms. One of the founders and a president of the New Britain Institute, Butler was instrumental in enriching the cultural life of the community. He must be partially credited with the birth of the New Britain Museum of American Art, in that it was his initial 1903 donation to the New Britain Institute (the museum’s parent institution) that provided the first funds designated for use “in payment for the purchase or acquisition of original, modern oil paintings, either by native or foreign artists.”4 (4)

The circumstances and date of the commission of Chase’s portrait of Talcott are unknown, but it is likely that it was painted about 1900 to hang in the offices of the American Hosiery Company.5 (5) Chase may have been brought to Talcott’s attention by Sarah Whiting Talcott, the sitter’s first cousin who had studied with Chase at the Art Students League.6 (6) Although little is known of her career, she seems to have held Chase in great esteem, as her name is included in the list of subscribers supporting the presentation of a portrait bust of him at New York University in 1924.7 (7) Talcott’s brother Charles, an art collector, and his nephew, Connecticut artist Allen Butler Talcott, who had studied at the Art Students League during Chase’s tenure there, also may have brought together sitter and artist.8 (8)

Chase’s image of his elderly subject, though a solid example of this area of his art, is relatively perfunctory in its effect, a common characteristic of the majority of official male portraiture of the time. The painting relies on the European painting traditions that Chase revered and claims as its lineage the work of Raphael and Velázquez, whose images of powerful religious and government officials set the standard for the genre. Chase, like other artists, used this iconography to confer similar traits of power and achievement upon his male subjects. Thus, Talcott appears a venerable personage whose accomplishments deserve commemoration and entitle him to respect. Yet in spite of the conservative aesthetic parameters afforded by the official nature of the commission, Chase fulfilled the fundamental purpose of portraiture by creating an acceptable likeness of the sitter and by capturing Talcott’s physical frailty without sacrificing his dignity.9 (9)

BDG

Bibliography:
Katherine Metcalf Roof, “The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase” (New York: Scribner, 1917); Ronald G. Pisano, “A Leading Spirit in American Art: William Merritt Chase” (Seattle: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1983); Keith L. Bryant Jr., “William Merritt Chase: A Genteel Bohemian” (Columbia, Mo., and London: University of Missouri Press, 1991); Barbara Dayer Gallati, “William Merritt Chase” (New York: Harry N. Abrams, 1995).

NOTES:
1. The only published source devoted to Chase’s portraiture is Carolyn Kinder Carr, “William Merritt Chase: Portraits”, exhib. cat. (Akron, Oh.: Akron Art Museum, 1982).
2. Sebastian Visscher Talcott, “Talcott Pedigree in England and America from 1558 to 1876” (Albany: Weed, Parson, 1876).
3. The biographical information presented here relies chiefly on the lengthy obituary “John B. Talcott Dead,” “Hartford Times”, February 21, 1905, and other vertical file materials, New Britain Public Library.
4. John C. White, “History of the New Britain Museum of American Art,” unpaginated, undated typescript, New Britain Public Library, Local History Room. White also states that Talcott “may have been the first to propose the collection.” See also “Introduction: Collecting for ‘Our Factory Hands’” in volume 1.
5. At the time of its donation to the New Britain Museum in 1943, the painting was collected from the premises of this firm (NBMAA files).
6. On Sarah Whiting Talcott, see John William Leonard, ed., “Woman’s Who’s Who of America” (New York: American Commonwealth Company, 1914), p. 801; and Mantle Fielding, “Dictionary of American Painters, Sculptors and Engravers” (Greens Farms, Conn.: Modern Books and Crafts, 1974), p. 360.
7. “Memorial Exercises Attending the Unveiling of a Bust of William M. Chase” (New York: New York University, 1924).
8. Allen Butler Talcott, “Painter of Landscapes: An Allen Butler Talcott, “Painter of Landscapes: An Eightieth Birthday Exhibition for The New Britain Museum of American Art”, exhib. cat. (New Britain: New Britain Museum of American Art, 1983).
9. The portrait closely resembles a photograph of Talcott that accompanied his obituary in the “Hartford Times”, which also notes that he had been in “delicate health” for several years.

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