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William Merritt Chase Painter American (Nineveh, Indiana, 1849 - 1916) View objects by this artist.

Chase settled in New York in 1878 after five years studying in Munich and became the most important American teacher of his generation. He taught at the Art Students' League of New York and then at his own Chase School of Art, founded in 1896. The vigorous handling and fresh color characteristic of much of the best American painting of the early 20th century owes a good deal to his example. His pupils (whom he encouraged to paint in the open air) included Demuth, O'Keefe, and Sheeler. Chase was a highly prolific artist (his output of more than 2000 paintings included still lifes, portraits, interiors, and landscapes), and his work is represented in many American museums.

William Merritt Chase has been called the quintessential American artist; a master painter, a rebel, an accomplished craftsman, a powerful teacher, America's first Impressionist, a painter's painter, and a dazzling personality. He painted a good bit of almost everything, and he did it with spontaneous brushwork that delighted in the very smell and juicy texture of paint as he moved within a range of realist techniques from the dark, moody tones of the nineteenth-century classical school to the shimmering, dancing hues of an Impressionist's outdoor palette. The commonplace intrigued Chase more than the grandiose, though it was his boldly stated aim to transfer the one into the other with the alchemy of his brushwork. Even in painting something so ordinary as a fish was a source of delight. He loved the infinite variety of these marine creatures, the exquisitely colored tones of their flesh when fresh from the water, and the way their surfaces reflected the light. Perhaps he would be best remembered as a painter of fish, he commented, because the art of capturing the sheen and radiance of their scales demanded as nimble a technique as did a penetrating portrait.

An Indiana Native, Chase was born in Nineveh, a small town thirty-five miles south of Indianapolis. Because of young William's talent for drawing, his father allowed him to study with a local artist named Barton Hays. From that initial instruction, he moved on to the National Academy of Design in New York. When the family moved to St. Louis, Chase's still lifes were already attracting moderate attention, and to his utter delight, two local men of wealth were moved to underwrite his training in Europe. The young artist was twenty-three years old when he entered the Royal Academy of Munich. When he left five years later to teach at the Art Students League in New York, he was fast approaching international fame. Throughout his lifetime he was to continue to draw strength from periodic visits to Europe where he painted, exhibited, and accepted awards. At the age of thirty-six, Chase was honored with the presidency of the Society of American Artists, a capacity in which he served for ten years. In 1898, he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, an organization newly formed that year.

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