William Merritt Chase
American, 1849-1916
Dorothy in Pink, 1910 ca.
oil on canvas
42 1/2 × 38 1/4 in.
SBMA, Gift of Mrs. Sterling Morton for the Preston Morton Collection
1960.53
Portrait of Chase by Annie Traguair Lang, 1910
“You must try to match your colors as nearly as you can to those you see before you, and you must study the effects of light and shade on nature’s own hues and tints.” – William Merritt Chase
RESEARCH PAPER
Dorothy Bremen Chase (1891-1953), the subject of her father’s painting, was one of eight children born to artist William Merritt Chase and his beautiful, younger wife, Alice Gerson.
Chase was 37 when he married twenty-year old Alice in 1886. Alice gave birth to their daughter Dorothy when she turned 25. Throughout Dorothy’s life she and her mother were subjects of several of Chase’s paintings, appearing in solo portraits and with other family members. In fact, our museum is proud to display four of Chase’s paintings, with “Dorothy in Pink” and “Lady in Pink” (a full-length portrait of Alice) hanging on opposite walls in Ludington Court.
“Dorothy in Pink” was painted in 1910 when Dorothy was 19 years old. She is seated in a gold patinated chair, her right arm resting on the arm of the chair with her slender hand dangling off the chair’s side, showing her relaxed state as she poses for her dad. Dorothy’s left elbow is positioned on the chair’s other arm with an accordion fan resting on her lap.
Dorothy is clad in a rose pink and white brocade floral embroidered day coat, fashionable amongst women of high society in the early 1900s. The day coat and dress were worn inside their home only as they prepared for the day’s activities. The coat has wide pagoda sleeves that are pleated and belled. The day dress worn underneath has lacy long sleeves that peak out of the day coat. The dress has vertical brush stroke lines leading the viewer to look up at Dorothy’s necklace and then to her serene face. The long necklace is adorned with a rose-pink bow with an ivory amulet dangling from a black velvet ribbon around her neck. The necklace provides a major focal point to the painting. She is also adorned with a ring on her right hand.
Dorothy’s composed face is angled, with light hitting half of her face, the other half shadowed in a dramatic chiaroscuro effect. She is seated against a brown background without any detail, so the viewer’s eye is focused only on her portraiture. The limited color palette and subtle brushstrokes adds to the paintings overall serene mood, reflecting Chase’s implementation of colors, emphasizing his use of “light and shade.”
Dorothy’s father, William Merritt Chase, was an American artist who was a prolific painter of portraits, landscapes and still lifes. He is probably best known today as an influential teacher to such artists as George Bellows, Edward Hopper, Georgia O’Keefe, Marsden Hartley, Rockwell Kent, Joseph Stella, Charles Demuth and Charles Sheeler—students who would eventually overshadow their mentor’s career and legacy. Additionally, he was considered a sophisticated cosmopolitan leader amongst artists, a gifted connoisseur of American and European paintings and a devoted family man.
William Chase was born in Indiana in 1849, the oldest of six children of a modestly successful shoe merchant and his wife. In 1872 after studying art in Indianapolis and at New York’s National Academy of Design, Chase was offered financial support for two years by a group of St. Louis businessmen in exchange for some of his paintings and his help in securing European art for their collection. Chase chose to study in Munich rather than Paris, which was the most coveted place for aspiring American artists of that time, because he thought the German city would be less distracting. He enrolled in the Munich Academy, but was most influenced by the flashy brushstrokes and dramatic chiaroscuro of Wilhelm Leibl and the realism of Gustave Courbet and the old masters such as Peter Paul Rubens and Frans Hals.
Chase returned to New York in 1878 to teach at the recently founded Art Students League. He became known for a flamboyance that he flaunted in his dress, his manners and in his rented studio in the Tenth Street Studio Building in Greenwich Village, the first building in New York erected specifically for artists’ use. There he created a beautiful studio filled with lavish furniture, decorative objects, stuffed birds, oriental carpets, and exotic musical instruments. The studio served as a focal point for the sophisticated and stylish New York City art world members of the late 19th century.
Chase painted a series of New York park scenes from 1886 to about 1890. After marrying Alice Gerson in February 1887, they moved to his parent’s house in Brooklyn, where his first child was born and where he painted landscapes of Prospect and Tompkins Parks. He eventually moved his family to New York City and painted several scenes from Central Park. Chase’s interests in park images can be attributed to his lifelong friend, John Singer Sargent’s “In the Luxembourg Gardens” (1879) and James McNeill Whistler, who made etchings of London and Paris parks as well as painting portraits that Chase admired. In fact, Chase began using the name of the color in the title of his paintings, such as “Dorothy in Pink” to emphasize their aesthetic rather than factual content, attributed to his friendship with Whistler, who used colors in the title of his paintings, i.e., ”Arrangement in Pink, Red and Purple.”
In addition to his paintings, Chase actively developed an interest in teaching. He opened the Shinnecock Hills Summer School on eastern Long Island in 1891 and taught there until 1902. Chase adopted the ‘plein air method’ of painting and often provided instruction to his students in outdoor classes. He also opened the Chase School of Arts in 1896, which became the New York School of Arts two years later (becoming the Parsons School for Design) with Chase staying on as an instructor until 1907. He was considered the most important teacher of the American artists around the turn of the 20th century.
William Merritt Chase worked in all media. He was most fluent in oil painting and pastel, but also created watercolors and etchings. He is perhaps best known for his portraits, his sitters including some of the most important men and women of his time, such as “Lydia Field Emmet,” a portrait displayed in our museum, in addition to his own family portraits which includes our lovely “Dorothy in Pink.”
Prepared for the Santa Barbara Museum of Art Docent Council by Emily Marino, 2024.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Glisson, James, “‘It’s in My Mind”: William Merritt Chase and the Imagination.” Panorama: Journal of the Association of Historians of American Art 3 no. 1 (summer, 2017).
Hirshler, Erica “William Merritt Chase” MFA Publications, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 2016.
Hughes, Robert “American Visions: The Epic History of Art in America,” Alfred A. Knopf, New York, 1999.
Pisano, Robert G. “A Leading Spirit in American Art: William Merritt Chase 1849-1916”,Henry Art Gallery University of Washington, Seattle, 1983.
Roof, Katherine Metcalf “The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase” Audubon Press, 2010.
Smithgall, Elsa, et al “William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master,” Yale University Press, 2016.
SBMA CURATORIAL LABELS
After five years studying at the Munich Academy, capped off by nine months in Venice, Chase returned to New York in 1876 where he taught at the Art Students League. The elegant realism of his early style was said to give way to the brighter palette of the French Impressionists, after the artist Alfred Stevens asked him after a studio visit in 1881, “Why do you want to look like the old masters?” Chase went on to become one of the most highly regarded American Impressionists and influential teachers of the next generation, whose students included such diverse talents as Charles Demuth, Marsden Hartley, Edward Hopper, and Georgia O’Keeffe.
This is a portrait of the artist’s third of eight children, likely done when she was in her late teens. It may have been done as a pendant to a painting of the artist’s wife, which is of around the same size and format, showing Dorothy’s mother seated at three-quarter length. By this point in Chase’s career, he enjoyed all the trappings of a successful gentleman artist, holding regular Salons at his spacious studio on Tenth Street in New York, filled with his art, as well as the collectibles he brought home from his many travels abroad. The loose, brilliant brushwork and light palette are characteristic of Chase’s mature style, which offered a pleasant alternative to the more sober Realism of Thomas Eakins.
- Preston Morton Reinstallation, 2024