Critical Archive of the Visual and Related Arts
William Meritt Chase
American; 19th-century
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)