Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
William Meritt Chase
American; 19th-century, 20th-century
Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum
76%
Fish and Still Life. c1908. Oil on canvas
I'll never not see Chase's paintings as merely garlanded by, rather than imbued with or born from, Impressionist techniques. His paintings don't indicate a way of seeing but a way of painting. Inevitably, this limits their quality, but on occasion it creates unique aesthetic possibilities. Namely, there can be something compelling that crawls out of the gap between Chase's style and his substance. If Impressionism is this painting's garland, then the painting itself is a thing that rebuffs garlanding, like a dirty iron pan or a barrel. The heft of the fish and that huge hulking cauldron and the suffocating closeness to each other of all of these stuffs and the bottomless black depths of Chase's colors — even, it somehow seems, the lighter ones — are completely hostile to his vibrant application of paint. There's an excrescence of pigment behind the gills of the big cod in the dish that almost looks like the paint being pushed off the surface of the canvas by the too-full image behind it. (TFS, 2026)
Omaha, NE: Joslyn Art Museum
39%
Sunlight and Shadow. 1884. Oil on canvas
Chase was not the most talented American to go to Europe and learn about Impressionism; that honor belongs to Mary Cassatt. As is usual in his outdoor scenes, he has a hard time in this painting developing a convincing sense of three-dimensional space. The barrel in the background is of an extremely ambiguous shape; the sunlight seems to be falling randomly through the trees and it’s hard to tell just where in the sky the sun is meant to be; I’m not sure if the red building to the right lies parallel to the fence or is angling away from it. Chase should really have stuck to portraits, which he always executed well. At the time, though, anyone who could reproduce the loose brushwork of the Parisian school was in high demand, hence his outdoor scenes, though technically flawed, were popular. There is a tradition among my family that this painting’s actual title is The Tiff. I can believe it — the man has already smoked three cigarettes and is on his fourth, and he can’t seem to focus on his newspaper; the girl seems more pouting than wistful. In the hands of a master of genre such as Edmund Leighton, this would have been a superb painting. (WC, 2025)
Seattle, WA: Henry Art Gallery
38%
Over the Hills and Far Away. c1897. Oil on canvas
Chase displays some very minor facility with color in the bottom fifth of this painting: it's attractive how those aquas slink through their purples and greens. But the effect of this is slight, and Chase fails to export it to any other region of the canvas, the totality of which is flatly flat and underexpressed in terms of line and hue. Despite the lightness and variability of their tones, the greens in the fields seem sort of heavy and hulking as they lie there in the midground, and the sky bears down upon it all with a discomfiting ambivalence. There's nothing anywhere to punctuate Chase's leaden brushwork, nothing to lighten the load of all this paint. The horizon is obsequious in its flatness; those two trees at right don't do enough to challenge the state of things. This painting fails to deliver on the few meagre promises it makes. (TFS, 2026)