American painting and its tradition : $b as represented by Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer, La Farge, Whistler, Chase, Alexander, SargentVan Dyke, John C.
History
American painting and its tradition : $b as represented by Inness, Wyant, Martin, Homer, La Farge, Whistler, Chase, Alexander, Sargent
Van Dyke, John C.
Painters -- United States; Painting -- United States
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.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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