Part 11

The deriding of Whistler was not indulged in by press and public alone. The painter people--the inspired ones, who by reason of their calling are the only ones competent to judge of art--stoned him, too. Royal academicians dealt him harder knocks than plebeian critics. But he always had a following of his own, and before he died the following had grown into a procession. Since his death his influence has been more far-reaching than that of any modern. His pictures were not only adopted, assimilated, imitated in England and France but all over Europe. Here in America the exhibitions still show his color schemes and arrangements as comprehended by his admiring young converts. Without taking on pupils, as Couture and Gleyre had done, he nevertheless became far more of a _chef d’Ecole_ than either of them. That is what he would have called perhaps handing on the tradition. He believed that he himself was an inheritor and a transmitter--one of the links in the great art chain.

But it was not the American tradition that Whistler handed on. We claim him as one of us because he was born here, but his art does not represent us in any way. His Thames nocturnes are not those of the Hudson, his portraits are not of our people, and his decorative patterns never were seen in American life or art. He handed on the blended traditions of Gleyre and Hiroshige, not the legend of Copley and Stuart and Durand. That may be matter for regret in history but it surely is not to be regretted in art. For Whistler gave us a new and a beautiful point of view in painting. Realist, idealist, impressionist, cubist, futurist--none of the terms describe him or even suggest his work. As an artist he was unique, and his art, instead of reproducing a species, stemmed out into a new variety of surpassing loveliness and beauty. We would not be without it. We are not sure that its “name and fame will live forever,” as the Pennells put it, but it will live.

VIII

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE

A distribution and pigeonholing of our nine American painters as regards aim and tendency would perhaps place Inness, Wyant, and Martin among the most intelligent and sympathetic of the earlier men; Homer, La Farge, and Whistler the most detached and self-sufficient of the middle men, and Chase, Alexander, and Sargent the most facile and best trained of the younger men. The last three may, indeed, stand as epitomizing the art movement which took form and gave tongue in the Society of American Artists.

That movement was epoch-making. There was awakening to the fact that painting in America as a craft was not technically understood, that it was not properly taught--could not be taught in America. With that came the departure for Europe of many young students and their training in the studios of Munich and Paris. When the Society of American Artists finally got under way in the early eighties its initial reason for existence was that its members at least knew how to paint. They had been abroad and learned the grammar of their art and were now returned to show their countrymen the finished craftsman. Sargent’s influence was largely through the example of his portraits and Alexander’s vogue was to come a little later; but Chase was the one that arrived early in the day, carried the banner, and announced that art had come to town.

All three of these men grounded themselves in technical method which seemed the necessity of the hour, and all three of them have remained so bedded in method that their art has rarely risen above it or beyond it. Chase, more radical than the others, proclaimed his belief that method was art itself and that a brilliant, dashing manner took precedence over matter. He would not admit that art was more than a surface expression. His belief was, of course, properly adjusted to his own mental equipment. He and Whistler, with many another artist, could cleverly compound for qualities

“they were inclined to By damning those they had no mind to.”

Unconsciously, no doubt, every one’s tendency is to regard his own limitations as self-imposed and his work right in kind if not in degree. Perhaps that is what Chase meant in a talk at the National Arts Club some years ago when he said: “They say I am conceited. I don’t deny it. I believe in myself. I do and I must.” As philosophy that may not be very profound but as a working faith, paint-brush in hand, it is superb. With such faith and purpose Chase produced scores of pictures that showed his declared point of view, and trained hundreds of pupils not only in his enthusiasm but in his own crisp, clean handling. He was a painter from beginning to end, and exemplified the aim and carry of the Society of American Artists better than any one artist of his time.

He came out of the near West, having been born in Williamsburg, Indiana, in 1849. The village was a small one, less than two hundred inhabitants when Chase was a boy, and what elementary schooling he received there may be imagined. His parents were Indiana people, and the home influence probably did not incline him to art. He saw illustrations in magazines and books and that put the childish wish in his head to “make pictures for books.” He drew with colored pencils, had the little water-color cubes known to all children, and soon made a local reputation among schoolmates and family friends for drawing portraits. At twelve his parents moved to Indianapolis, and at sixteen he entered his father’s shoe-store as a clerk. The biographies of painters[12] almost always afford such incidents as these. They are supposed to indicate genius trying to orient itself, but perhaps they are no more than vacillations of the youthful mind. At that time Chase had not definitely decided upon art as a career. At nineteen he thought to be some day a naval officer. As a preliminary step he enlisted as a sailor at Annapolis, and was assigned to the training-ship _Portsmouth_. He probably did not know what else to do and it was an adventure at least; but he soon discovered that it was also a mistake. His father got him out of it and together they went back to the family shoe-shop in Indianapolis.

[12] There is an excellent biography of Chase--_The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase_, by Katharine Metcalf Roof, New York, 1917.

There was some more experimental portraiture, with members of the household and the family calf as models, and then Chase was sent to a local painter by the name of Benjamin Hayes, who accepted him as a pupil. Art definitely began for him then and there. He was with Hayes several months--long enough to take a studio and set up as a painter on his own account. At twenty he went to New York with a letter to J. O. Eaton, whose pupil he became and with whom he remained for two years. He seems to have had an early liking for independent quarters, for while a student in New York he set up another studio in Twenty-third Street. After his two years with Eaton he once more went back to the paternal roof, then in St. Louis. Here he occupied a studio with J. W. Pattison, and for a year painted pictures, principally pictures of still-life. Then he happened to see a picture by John Mulvaney, and that gave him the idea of going abroad for study.

Some St. Louis patrons advanced money to him and he went to Munich--a city at that time perhaps more frequented by art students than Paris. Duveneck, Dielman, Currier, Shirlaw were there, and Chase at once entered into the student life of the city. He was enrolled in the school of the Munich Royal Academy, with Kaulbach at its head, and he was also a student under Piloty; but the outside influence of Leibl was potent upon all the Munich students at that time, Chase included. In addition he studied to his profit the old masters in the Alte Pinacothek, especially Van Dyck, and was susceptible to impressions from Duveneck and perhaps Habermann, a German student friend. Some years ago in a European retrospective exhibition I was struck by a Habermann portrait that was practically a duplicate of Chase’s “Ready for the Ride,” but whether it was Chase following Habermann or Habermann following Chase, I could not determine.

With his various activities Chase cut quite a figure in the student world of Munich and was regarded as a coming man. He won competitions, painted Piloty’s children, painted “The Turkish Page,” the Duveneck portrait called “The Smoker,” “The Jester,” “The Dowager,” “The Apprentice Boy,” “The Broken Jug,” and other works. A chance to review some of these pictures was recently afforded at the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, where Chase was represented by a roomful of pictures, and many people were astonished to find how very solidly and beautifully painted were these early examples. They were, of course, dark in illumination with some bitumen in the shadows. It was studio light, not _plein air_ that Munich taught. It took Chase a number of years to arrive at a higher key of light, but in other matters of technique he had become something of a master before leaving Munich--so much so that he was asked to remain as an instructor in the Bavarian Academy. He declined, however, and in 1877 went to Venice, where he joined Duveneck and Twachtman and remained for nearly a year.

Venice meant not a great deal to Chase. He painted it, but in the formal Munich manner, and with little of the local light or color of the place. While there he fell upon hard times, was in financial straits, and became ill, possibly as the result of privations. But he continued painting, and, what is more astonishing, while in dire poverty he began collecting all sorts of artistic plunder. This was the beginning of a taste that he indulged in all his life. He bought pictures, rugs, brocades, silks, brass, guns, swords, jewels, rings--anything that was beautiful or artistic in design or color. At different times he had large collections of antiquities, and was ever hunting for more. At Venice he added two monkeys to his possessions, and when a few months later he returned to New York and took his Tenth Street studio he had several strange parrots and odd dogs as adjuncts to the place. The high walls of the big studio were hung with bits of tapestries, old velvets, pictures; the floor was covered with Oriental rugs; the tables were littered with clocks, pistols, old books, brass bowls; and the screens were draped with silks and brocades. It was the first “artistic” studio in New York.

This was in 1877 and Chase had returned to New York to become a teacher in the newly established Art Students League. That was the beginning of his long and very useful career as a teacher. The Art Students League and the Society of American Artists were started about the same time, the Metropolitan Museum having preceded them by a few years. The movement for art was under way and Chase had arrived at the psychological moment. Associated with Beckwith, Blum, Shirlaw, and others he immediately took a positive interest in current art matters. The big studio became the gathering-place of the young men, where resolutions were passed and committees were set in motion. Society also found its way there, for Chase gave Saturday receptions when the door with the vibrating lyre on the back of it was swung open by a colored servant in fez and gown, and pictures and antiquities were displayed and talked about by the painter himself. At other times dinners and dances were given there, to which came many notables. People from the opera sang, Carmencita danced, and society people posed in picture-frames for the characters of Titian and Van Dyck. Chase had a decided vogue, social as well as artistic, almost from the very start.

As a painter he was taken seriously and received his meed of praise with few dissenting voices. Almost every one in the press and magazines hailed him as the much-needed person--the man who technically knew how to paint. His pictures at no time ever sold very well, but that was for the reason perhaps that they never possessed an intimate human interest, not because they were indifferently painted. On the whole, though some of the elders looked askance at his broad brushing, or thought his themes somewhat material and superficial, he had no grievance of a Whistler kind against either critic or public. The art clubs elected him to membership, he spent his first summer after his return in a trip through the Erie Canal with the Tile Club, in 1880 he became a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1883 its president. The same year he had organized and sent to Munich the first group of American pictures for exhibition there.

A curiosity as to how art had been produced by other people, in other times and countries as well as our own, was always with Chase. He was a great traveller, a great student of art, a great haunter of galleries and museums. In the thirty or more years that I knew him I had met him at different times in almost every gallery of Europe. Only a year or so before the Great War I was working in the Uffizi one hot July afternoon after every one had left the place. I had been alone for several hours when I heard steps approaching me down the long corridor. It was late and one of the attendants was probably coming to tell me it was time to close. But no; instead of that I heard in very good English:

“At it again, I see! At it again!”

I turned around to find Chase standing there. He, too, had stayed on in the heat after the crowd had gone, and had no doubt been prying into some Titian or questioning some Rembrandt or Rubens!

For many years he kept voyaging to Europe summer after summer. I never chanced to cross with him, but one spring, while bidding farewell to some friends who were sailing, I saw Chase jump out of a cab and scramble up the landing-stage--the last man to arrive--and still giving some directions over his shoulder to his colored man, who remained on the dock. On every steamer he sailed in he organized art, painted the cabin or smoke-room panels, sketched the captain, and made a portrait of the ship’s beauty. Arrived in Europe, he went to see not only exhibitions and museums but brothers of the craft in their studios. He spoke no French, Spanish, or Italian, and had only a limited vocabulary in German, but that made no difference. He got on better with Boldini and Alfred Stevens in Paris using the sign language than with Whistler in London exchanging biting English. Everywhere he was welcomed and treated as a man of distinction in his profession, and everywhere he saw something new and was perhaps influenced thereby.

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.