Chapter X: John S. Sargent 243 (5)

Both the Carlyle and the mother portraits had their prototypes in the groups of Frans Hals at Haarlem. Whistler much admired Hals’s late portraits of Women Regents there, and found in them his “arrangement in gray and black.” But about the same time with the Carlyle he painted a portrait of Miss Alexander, the like of which had never before been seen. It was the portrait of a little girl, hat in hand, standing at full length in a room, with daisies at the side and butterflies at the back. The title of it was a “Harmony in Gray and Green.” The pattern was beautiful, the color delightful, the pose childlike, and even realistic. But London would not have it. It was “gruesomeness in gray,” “a rhapsody in raw child and cobwebs,” “a disagreeable presentment,” and “uncompromisingly vulgar.” Not even in the turbulent times of Delacroix and “the drunken broom” had criticism so cheapened its array and shot so wide of the mark.

In spite of abuse Whistler continued producing portraits--one of Leyland in evening dress standing at full length, an “arrangement in black”; one of Mrs. Leyland, never entirely completed, a very beautiful “symphony in flesh color and pink”; one of Mrs. Huth in black velvet, another “arrangement in black.” They were all realistic enough as regards the likeness but decoratively arranged as regards pattern and color. They were, once more, the blended view of the West and the East, and Whistler never tried to disguise the fact. He sought to place the figure in the canvas as far as he stood from the sitter when painting the picture, but otherwise he adhered to the flattening of the pattern, the simplicity of the arrangement, and the predominance of a tone of color.

In 1876 Whistler was given _carte blanche_ to produce one of his tone effects in a room at the Leyland house. This afterward became known as the Peacock Room. It held the picture of the “Princesse du Pays de la Porcelaine” at one end, was decorated elsewhere with peacocks, furnished with cabinets of blue-and-white china, and set off with blue and gold in the walls and ceiling. The idea of the peacocks had probably come to Whistler from some Japanese master, perhaps Okio, and the rest of it was his own arrangement of color. The next year was that of the suit against Ruskin. London laughed and Whistler shortly thereafter went into bankruptcy. Everything was seized and sold, bringing little or nothing. The tide was at its lowest ebb, and the painter was left stranded, but by no means dead or even moribund.

When he had sufficiently recuperated he went off to Venice, where he gathered a little coterie of admirers about him who referred to him as “the master,” and where he talked much, and did some etchings and some pastels on colored paper. The first series of Venetian etchings, twelve in number, were done in the summer of 1880, and possibly he never went beyond such plates as “The Rialto,” “The Bridge”, and “The Traghetto.” They seem the most flawless of his etched work. As for the pastels, they were largely notes of color, line, or movement, and while charming as notes, they were not impeccable in drawing. They were never intended to be realistic in any modern sense; they were, in fact, mere flying autumn leaves that meant nothing aside from form and color and their airy lightness.

In November Whistler returned to London, and the sniping and sharpshooting began again. It was temporarily interrupted by the death of his mother in January, but soon broke out anew. Portraits were being painted--that of Duret in evening clothes with a domino on his arm, and one of Lady Archibald Campbell, called “The Yellow Buskin,” an “arrangement in black,” being the most notable. “The Yellow Buskin,” now in the Fairmount Park Gallery, Philadelphia, appeals to many people as perhaps Whistler’s most spirited and effective portrait, but London criticism viewed it lightly. The _Morning Advertiser_ said “its obvious affectations render the work displeasing,” and another critic stated that “he has placed one of his portraits on an asphalt floor and against a coal-black background, the whole apparently representing a dressy woman in an inferno of the worldly.” The public was equally unconvinced. So in 1884 Whistler mounted the platform at Princes Hall and in his _Ten O’Clock_ set forth not only his philosophy of art but his scorn and contempt for almost everybody and everything excepting art and artists. The lecture created a stir, was repeated at Oxford and Cambridge, and Whistler became famous as one who could write even if he could not paint. Oddly enough, his lecture seemed to command more respect than his pictures, though it had not a tithe of their sincerity.

At any rate, the painter’s fortunes now began to mend. He joined the Society of British Artists, and two years later became its president. In 1888 he was married to Beatrix Godwin, widow of E. B. Godwin, the architect, afterward moving to No. 21 Cheyne Walk, where many orders for portraits came to him. Success and honors came also. France gave him the Legion of Honor, Bavaria made him an academician, he had the Cross of St. Michael, and later on Glasgow University gave him an LL.D. His pictures at auction increased in price five and ten fold; his commission prices were in proportion. He grew so affluent that he could even decline to paint a ceiling for the Boston Public Library. At last the light was beginning to dawn--a trifle late, to be sure, but nevertheless it was welcomed by the painter.

In the W. P. Wilstach Collection, Fairmount Park Gallery.]

The rest is soon told. In 1892 he moved to Paris and lived in the rue du Bac. A studio was opened for pupils in Paris at which he agreed to give lessons. It was popular at first, but did not last long. He travelled back and forth to London a good deal, and finally returned to England to live. Quarrels had followed him to Paris and the Eden trial had taken place there. It was unfortunate. _Trilby_ had been written and Whistler was parodied in it, which caused another tempest in a teapot. Then Mrs. Whistler died, and that was not only a great shock but a lasting grief. He never quite got over it. He wandered to Paris and Rome, but he cared little for them; he kept at work with feverish energy, but he accomplished little. He was evidently broken, not only in spirit but in body; and his death in July, 1903, was hardly a surprise to his more intimate friends. The overstrung bow at last had snapped.

For many years Whistler had been wrongly estimated alike by friend and foe. That one admired and the other condemned did not change the measure of extravagance. There was exaggeration on both sides. Since his death his critics have held their tongues, but many of his admirers have burst into print with impressions and reminiscences that are quite out of proportion and give a misleading idea of the man and the painter. The best account of him is that of the Pennells. They were devoted to him and wrote enthusiastically about him, as they should; but they did not fail to give the pros and cons in parallel columns. Moreover, they did not make him out a jester with cap and bells, a poseur, a wit, and a fop, but a very sincere and serious artist stung to resentment by the stupidity and studied insults of a perverse generation. That is precisely the right point of view, but unfortunately the Pennells are about the only ones who have consistently held it. The other accounts, for the most part, deal with his personal appearance, his witticisms, his eccentricities, his quarrels, and let his art go with a few rhapsodic generalities.

As for the descriptions of Whistler’s personality, they give a false impression by undue emphasis on certain appearances. My acquaintance with him was after 1890, though I had met him some years before. At no time was I impressed with his “flashing” eye, or his “claw-like” hands, or his “white lock,” or his “dandified” costume. They were not marked features unless one were looking for them. He was slightly built, refined-looking, and carried himself well, even gracefully. The Chase portrait of him is so foolish that even Chase could not show it without apologies and explanations; and as for the Boldini portrait, it is thoroughly Mephistophelian. About the latter, Whistler said: “They say that looks like me; but I hope I don’t look like that.” The portrait is a typical Boldini, with all that that implies of vulgarity and insinuation. But Whistler looked like a gentleman, not like a _boulevardier_.

His manner was courteous and his disposition usually good-natured. I never saw anything of his waspishness, nor heard any of his vitriolic retorts. He talked soberly and very sensibly unless aroused or driven into a corner by argument. Then he would fight back viciously enough and with excellent wit. From some quick answers to foolish people he finally became known for repartee and his name was used as a peg upon which many sharp sayings were hung, and he quite innocent of them. The only bright retort from him that I ever heard was made at my own expense. I recount it as illustrative of his brightness.

One night at the Pennells’, Whistler had been grumbling in an amusing way over art criticism and art critics. No one answered him. He had the floor entirely to himself and the rest of us were content to smile. Near eleven o’clock, as I rose to go, and Whistler and Pennell went with me to the door, I ventured to say that art critics were not very different from other people, that they did the best they could, but were human and often erred. It was good-natured deprecation of his point of view, which he met by putting his hand on my shoulder and saying with equal good nature:

“Oh, my dear Van Dyke, don’t misunderstand. We none of us think of you as an art critic.” Everybody laughed, myself included. There was not a particle of venom in it. I had written about him in praise in the early eighties when others were abusing him and he had thanked me for it; I was in his good books. To be sure, the retort was hardly new. John Brougham had launched it at Lester Wallack many years before. But the cleverness of it lay in its application.

Whistler liked to talk, especially if there was an audience of half a dozen. He was then very willing to fill space in the spot-light and conduct the session, especially if art was up for discussion. Another night, at a Pennell dinner, a very clever man--one of the editors of the _Daily Telegraph_--was present. He had recently returned from the far North--beyond Spitzbergen--and had been telling us about the brilliancy of the Northern color. Whistler, beside whom I sat, was not interested and kept tugging at my arm, telling me that it was mere raw color and not art. To that I finally had to make reply that I cared not a rap whether the color was artistic or not, that I was interested in the mere fact of its brilliancy. With that he flung around in his chair, turning his back on me, much as a child might do, and remained silent until the subject changed.

But it is an error to infer that because he was often witty and occasionally petty, wit and pettishness were his outstanding characteristics. By setting forth unrelieved chapters of his stories and sayings the impression has been produced that he started a new quarrel each morning before breakfast and shot envenomed shafts until sunset. That his witticisms were scattered over a period of forty years is neither stated nor implied. As a matter of fact, he was almost always in a serious mood, and, with his knowledge and gift of language, talked most sensibly and persuasively. I remember many interesting and informing talks with him when there was no jesting and not even smiling. In his own studio, with his own pictures on the easel and he explaining his intention and its development on the canvas, he was at his best. He was then a reasonable, sensible painter, with none of the pose of the _Ten O’Clock_ and none of the vanity of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_. I have never met a more striking contradiction in an individual, and it always seemed to me that the Whistler of the sharp tongue and pen was not the true Whistler but merely a character assumed for the occasion.

His published writings, as one reads them to-day, are extravagantly brilliant, but hardly sincere, even from a Whistlerian point of view. Take from the _Ten O’Clock_, for instance, the oft-quoted sentence: “There never was an artistic period, there never was an art-loving nation.” A measure of truth lies under that, but Whistler knew that he exaggerated it, overstated it. Again the statement that “Art happens--no hovel is safe from it, no prince may depend upon it, the vastest intelligence cannot bring it about, and puny efforts to make it universal end in quaint comedy and coarse farce.” Here is another half-truth, but so arbitrarily insisted upon that one infers that art is really an isolated and unrelated phenomenon on the earth. Whistler knew better than that. Nothing “happens” in this world. There is a cause for every effect. Once more the remark about “the unlimited admiration daily produced by a very foolish sunset.” But he himself never was so foolish as to believe such nonsense. It was merely a rococo way of saying that art could not handle a sunset in a satisfactory manner, and that his art, in particular, preferred a twilight or a midnight. The _Ten O’Clock_ indeed explains Whistler’s art better than any other, and, of course, that was why it was written. His own limitations and necessities could not have been better set forth than by the sentence: “Nature is very rarely right; to such an extent even, that it might almost be said that nature is usually wrong.” He wanted to put a conventionalized nature into a decorative pattern, and he justified it by saying that a realistic nature is “usually wrong.” It is somewhat of a piece with his remark that “there are too many trees in the country.” There were--for Whistler’s art.

But it is useless to point out the superficial in the Whistler arguments--the falseness of analogy, for instance, in comparing national art with national mathematics. That statement was made to produce a laugh, and it succeeded. It is even stupid to point out the want of logic or historical truth in the _Ten O’Clock_. One might as well try to break Whistler’s own butterfly on a wheel. The lecture was written and delivered to astonish the natives. And it did. It was a charming bit of extravagance, beautifully written for platform delivery, and a delightful piece of literature for fireside reading. Had it been logical, temperate, well-guarded in its utterances, it would have fallen flat. It fitted the occasion, was a work of art in itself, and no more “happened” than Whistler’s pictures and etchings.

That he wrote extremely well makes it all the more unfortunate that he wrote at all. The letters of _The Gentle Art of Making Enemies_ are amusing, but leave an impression of flippancy and mere cleverness. These were qualities rightly enough used in a rough-and-tumble newspaper quarrel, but the reader does not leave them there. Unwittingly he looks for the same qualities in Whistler’s portraits and pastels, perhaps reads them into the art itself. Worse yet, he possibly arrives at the conclusion that the art is of less interest than the quarrels, of less moment than the passing gibe of the “foolish sunset,” or the casual irrelevance of “dragging in Velasquez.” Once more, it is a pity that Whistler the painter has to be confused with Whistler the critic-baiter. However well one comes out of a fight, it is generally with rumpled plumage and a lack of dignity. Whistler could well have afforded to go his way in silence. Why did he have to kick at every cur that barked at his heels? Degas said he acted as though he had no talent, and Degas was right.

After these books of bickerings one comes back to Whistler’s pictures with relief, for they at least are serious. That is not, however, to say that they are the greatest this, or the most wonderful that, in all painting. They are far from being impeccable, but they are not the wherewithal to suckle fools and chronicle small beer. No competent person nowadays thinks them other than very sincere art. His brothers of the craft have, indeed, so elevated them and him, so pedestalled and niched them both, that it is very doubtful if they can long hold out in their rarefied atmosphere. Again and again has the world been told that he was a faultless draftsman, that his brush was equal to that of Velasquez, and that his needle outdid Rembrandt. He did not believe so himself, nor, soberly considered, does his art affirm it.

The Pennell book contains photographs of a number of pictures labelled “destroyed,” and there were scores of canvases that never got so far as even to be photographed. Many of the pictures that escaped destruction are faulty in drawing, lacking in construction, out of proportion, or smitten with stiffness in the joints. Connie Gilchrist on the stage skipped the rope delightfully, but in Whistler’s portrait called “The Gold Girl” she is petrified. The “Sarasate” seems pinched in scale, the “Irving as Philip” is unbelievable in construction, the “Leyland” legs had to be redrawn from a model. Whistler glorified the people of Velasquez because “they stand upon their legs.” In his studio, showing his own portraits, his first question about each figure was: “How does it stand?” And then: “Does it stand easily, stand firm, stand in? Is it placed right on the canvas, has it enough body, enough atmospheric setting?” These were questions that had to do with realistic or representative appearance. Again and again he rubbed out the whole day’s work or destroyed the picture entirely. And he could write of himself to his printer in the severest terms, thus: “No, my drawing or sketch or whatever you choose, is damnable and no more like the superb original than if it had been done by the worst and most incompetent enemy.... There must be no record of this abomination.”

This, in measure, is the experience of every artist. He produces with difficulty and has scores of failures. It was not to Whistler’s discredit that he was so severe a judge of himself, but perhaps it dispels the delusion of his being an impeccable craftsman. Besides, there was an unusual reason for his lack of success with many pictures. It has been already suggested that he strove to harmonize the conflicting traditions of the West and the East. He was born and bred to the realism of the third dimension--to the protrusion or recession in space of planes, figures, lights, and colors. Midway in his career he took up with the decorative in Eastern art and strove to show the representative figure of the French with the flattened formula of the Japanese.

Whistler was thus on a seesaw the greater part of his artistic life, trying to maintain a balance between these two formulas. With almost every picture it was too much realism or too much decoration. To make the union more perfect he began the remorseless cutting down of the subject, reaching a limit in his nocturnes which were finally reduced to little more than night-sky effects. He cut out modelling and outline until the portrait of “Mrs. Leyland” became a mere tonal scheme, as flat almost as the wall at the back. Light, too, was dimmed and color lost its brilliancy in a prevailing harmony of low tones. Finally, the brush which had been heavily loaded in his Courbet days and ran freely (as witness the dress patterns even in the later “Lange Leizen”) became thin, watery, absorbent, almost diaphanous in its feathery imperceptible touch. On top of all this, and to further blend the representative into the decorative and draw the picture together, there occasionally came a thin wash of transparent gray or brown, covering the whole canvas and binding the drawing, the light, the color into one tonal envelope. In the final analysis, the canvas was rightly enough called an arrangement, a harmony, a symphony, a nocturne--what you will. Anything else was merely suggestion.

The etchings were not so amenable to Japanese pattern as the paintings, water-colors, and pastels, yet even in them there was the disposition, not so much toward flattening the planes as eliminating details, making suggestion answer for realization, and, later on, the further attempt to produce a tone effect by small scratchings and hatchings on the plate. The inclination is perhaps better shown in his lithotints, such as that of “The Thames” (Lithotint W. 125), than in the etchings.

The decorative arrangement was his view of what art should be and was more or less manifested in everything he did. Even the _Ten O’Clock_ is more decorative than realistic. The arrangement of the sentences and paragraphs is charming, and whether they mean anything or not is of small importance. Of course Whistler would have objected to being thus hung by his own rope, but he deliberately subordinated the sense of his sentences to their rhythm and tone. People who write (even art critics) are aware of what constitutes pattern and color in words and they are well pleased that the _Ten O’Clock_ was not representative but just as it is--that is, decorative and delightful. The painter people, however, seem to regard it as the inspired gospel of art and every word of it true. From which one may infer that the artist, when outside of his _métier_, can look at the wrong thing with that persistence sometimes thought peculiar to the unattached writer.

In the final analysis Whistler’s fame must rest upon his pictures, though a certain amount of notoriety will probably always be given his sayings and a proper admiration accompany his writings. As a painter and an etcher he has a now-unquestioned place and he will hold it. Nothing in nineteenth-century art is quite of a kind with his. It stands alone in its aim and purpose, belongs to no art movement of the time, proclaims the ideals of no race or people. As for the usual motives of painting, Whistler scorned them or denied them. He cared nothing about classicism or romanticism, nothing about sentiment, feeling, passion, or action. The dramatic, the tragic, the domestic, the illustrative were foreign to him. Even nature put him out. The country bored him, and the sea was only so much blue paint in a pattern. He was a maker of beautiful schemes of color and line, with just enough of human interest about them to lend a meaning and occasionally a touch of intimacy.

That seems like reducing his art to a very simple affair, but, on the contrary, within the self-imposed limitations there was room for the greatest variety. He did portraits, figures, genre pieces, sea-pieces, river-views; he worked in oils, water-colors, pastels; he etched many plates that are to-day the joy of connoisseurs, and he vastly improved the almost forgotten art of lithography. The breadth of his accomplishment was wide and the excellence of it high. Nothing that he ever did but has some note of color, some wave of line, some fastidious arrangement or grouping that serves as a mark of distinction. He did hundreds of pastels and water-colors no larger than one’s hand, that contain lovely figures and draperies, as, for example, the “Annabel Lee”; or gave suggestions of the sea or shore akin to “The Blue Wave,” or spread sky patterns comparable to the “Battersea Bridge.” These pictures are now widely scattered, and one does not realize how truly decorative their planning until he meets them to-day, hanging singly or in pairs, in some drawing-room. There they put other modern work out of countenance by the way they do not “break through the wall” but enhance and beautify it. It is household art of a most distinguished character in that it goes in the household and takes its place without quarrelling with everything about it. I have already quoted La Farge to the effect that in using the word “decorative” he was saying the best thing he could about a picture. There he and Whistler were in perfect agreement.

The deriding of Whistler was not indulged in by press and public alone. The painter people--the inspired ones, who by reason of their calling are the only ones competent to judge of art--stoned him, too. Royal academicians dealt him harder knocks than plebeian critics. But he always had a following of his own, and before he died the following had grown into a procession. Since his death his influence has been more far-reaching than that of any modern. His pictures were not only adopted, assimilated, imitated in England and France but all over Europe. Here in America the exhibitions still show his color schemes and arrangements as comprehended by his admiring young converts. Without taking on pupils, as Couture and Gleyre had done, he nevertheless became far more of a _chef d’Ecole_ than either of them. That is what he would have called perhaps handing on the tradition. He believed that he himself was an inheritor and a transmitter--one of the links in the great art chain.

But it was not the American tradition that Whistler handed on. We claim him as one of us because he was born here, but his art does not represent us in any way. His Thames nocturnes are not those of the Hudson, his portraits are not of our people, and his decorative patterns never were seen in American life or art. He handed on the blended traditions of Gleyre and Hiroshige, not the legend of Copley and Stuart and Durand. That may be matter for regret in history but it surely is not to be regretted in art. For Whistler gave us a new and a beautiful point of view in painting. Realist, idealist, impressionist, cubist, futurist--none of the terms describe him or even suggest his work. As an artist he was unique, and his art, instead of reproducing a species, stemmed out into a new variety of surpassing loveliness and beauty. We would not be without it. We are not sure that its “name and fame will live forever,” as the Pennells put it, but it will live.

VIII

WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE

A distribution and pigeonholing of our nine American painters as regards aim and tendency would perhaps place Inness, Wyant, and Martin among the most intelligent and sympathetic of the earlier men; Homer, La Farge, and Whistler the most detached and self-sufficient of the middle men, and Chase, Alexander, and Sargent the most facile and best trained of the younger men. The last three may, indeed, stand as epitomizing the art movement which took form and gave tongue in the Society of American Artists.

That movement was epoch-making. There was awakening to the fact that painting in America as a craft was not technically understood, that it was not properly taught--could not be taught in America. With that came the departure for Europe of many young students and their training in the studios of Munich and Paris. When the Society of American Artists finally got under way in the early eighties its initial reason for existence was that its members at least knew how to paint. They had been abroad and learned the grammar of their art and were now returned to show their countrymen the finished craftsman. Sargent’s influence was largely through the example of his portraits and Alexander’s vogue was to come a little later; but Chase was the one that arrived early in the day, carried the banner, and announced that art had come to town.

All three of these men grounded themselves in technical method which seemed the necessity of the hour, and all three of them have remained so bedded in method that their art has rarely risen above it or beyond it. Chase, more radical than the others, proclaimed his belief that method was art itself and that a brilliant, dashing manner took precedence over matter. He would not admit that art was more than a surface expression. His belief was, of course, properly adjusted to his own mental equipment. He and Whistler, with many another artist, could cleverly compound for qualities

“they were inclined to
By damning those they had no mind to.”

Unconsciously, no doubt, every one’s tendency is to regard his own limitations as self-imposed and his work right in kind if not in degree. Perhaps that is what Chase meant in a talk at the National Arts Club some years ago when he said: “They say I am conceited. I don’t deny it. I believe in myself. I do and I must.” As philosophy that may not be very profound but as a working faith, paint-brush in hand, it is superb. With such faith and purpose Chase produced scores of pictures that showed his declared point of view, and trained hundreds of pupils not only in his enthusiasm but in his own crisp, clean handling. He was a painter from beginning to end, and exemplified the aim and carry of the Society of American Artists better than any one artist of his time.

He came out of the near West, having been born in Williamsburg, Indiana, in 1849. The village was a small one, less than two hundred inhabitants when Chase was a boy, and what elementary schooling he received there may be imagined. His parents were Indiana people, and the home influence probably did not incline him to art. He saw illustrations in magazines and books and that put the childish wish in his head to “make pictures for books.” He drew with colored pencils, had the little water-color cubes known to all children, and soon made a local reputation among schoolmates and family friends for drawing portraits. At twelve his parents moved to Indianapolis, and at sixteen he entered his father’s shoe-store as a clerk. The biographies of painters[12] almost always afford such incidents as these. They are supposed to indicate genius trying to orient itself, but perhaps they are no more than vacillations of the youthful mind. At that time Chase had not definitely decided upon art as a career. At nineteen he thought to be some day a naval officer. As a preliminary step he enlisted as a sailor at Annapolis, and was assigned to the training-ship _Portsmouth_. He probably did not know what else to do and it was an adventure at least; but he soon discovered that it was also a mistake. His father got him out of it and together they went back to the family shoe-shop in Indianapolis.

[12] There is an excellent biography of Chase--_The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase_, by Katharine Metcalf Roof, New York, 1917.

There was some more experimental portraiture, with members of the household and the family calf as models, and then Chase was sent to a local painter by the name of Benjamin Hayes, who accepted him as a pupil. Art definitely began for him then and there. He was with Hayes several months--long enough to take a studio and set up as a painter on his own account. At twenty he went to New York with a letter to J. O. Eaton, whose pupil he became and with whom he remained for two years. He seems to have had an early liking for independent quarters, for while a student in New York he set up another studio in Twenty-third Street. After his two years with Eaton he once more went back to the paternal roof, then in St. Louis. Here he occupied a studio with J. W. Pattison, and for a year painted pictures, principally pictures of still-life. Then he happened to see a picture by John Mulvaney, and that gave him the idea of going abroad for study.

Some St. Louis patrons advanced money to him and he went to Munich--a city at that time perhaps more frequented by art students than Paris. Duveneck, Dielman, Currier, Shirlaw were there, and Chase at once entered into the student life of the city. He was enrolled in the school of the Munich Royal Academy, with Kaulbach at its head, and he was also a student under Piloty; but the outside influence of Leibl was potent upon all the Munich students at that time, Chase included. In addition he studied to his profit the old masters in the Alte Pinacothek, especially Van Dyck, and was susceptible to impressions from Duveneck and perhaps Habermann, a German student friend. Some years ago in a European retrospective exhibition I was struck by a Habermann portrait that was practically a duplicate of Chase’s “Ready for the Ride,” but whether it was Chase following Habermann or Habermann following Chase, I could not determine.

With his various activities Chase cut quite a figure in the student world of Munich and was regarded as a coming man. He won competitions, painted Piloty’s children, painted “The Turkish Page,” the Duveneck portrait called “The Smoker,” “The Jester,” “The Dowager,” “The Apprentice Boy,” “The Broken Jug,” and other works. A chance to review some of these pictures was recently afforded at the Panama-Pacific Exposition at San Francisco, where Chase was represented by a roomful of pictures, and many people were astonished to find how very solidly and beautifully painted were these early examples. They were, of course, dark in illumination with some bitumen in the shadows. It was studio light, not _plein air_ that Munich taught. It took Chase a number of years to arrive at a higher key of light, but in other matters of technique he had become something of a master before leaving Munich--so much so that he was asked to remain as an instructor in the Bavarian Academy. He declined, however, and in 1877 went to Venice, where he joined Duveneck and Twachtman and remained for nearly a year.

Venice meant not a great deal to Chase. He painted it, but in the formal Munich manner, and with little of the local light or color of the place. While there he fell upon hard times, was in financial straits, and became ill, possibly as the result of privations. But he continued painting, and, what is more astonishing, while in dire poverty he began collecting all sorts of artistic plunder. This was the beginning of a taste that he indulged in all his life. He bought pictures, rugs, brocades, silks, brass, guns, swords, jewels, rings--anything that was beautiful or artistic in design or color. At different times he had large collections of antiquities, and was ever hunting for more. At Venice he added two monkeys to his possessions, and when a few months later he returned to New York and took his Tenth Street studio he had several strange parrots and odd dogs as adjuncts to the place. The high walls of the big studio were hung with bits of tapestries, old velvets, pictures; the floor was covered with Oriental rugs; the tables were littered with clocks, pistols, old books, brass bowls; and the screens were draped with silks and brocades. It was the first “artistic” studio in New York.

This was in 1877 and Chase had returned to New York to become a teacher in the newly established Art Students League. That was the beginning of his long and very useful career as a teacher. The Art Students League and the Society of American Artists were started about the same time, the Metropolitan Museum having preceded them by a few years. The movement for art was under way and Chase had arrived at the psychological moment. Associated with Beckwith, Blum, Shirlaw, and others he immediately took a positive interest in current art matters. The big studio became the gathering-place of the young men, where resolutions were passed and committees were set in motion. Society also found its way there, for Chase gave Saturday receptions when the door with the vibrating lyre on the back of it was swung open by a colored servant in fez and gown, and pictures and antiquities were displayed and talked about by the painter himself. At other times dinners and dances were given there, to which came many notables. People from the opera sang, Carmencita danced, and society people posed in picture-frames for the characters of Titian and Van Dyck. Chase had a decided vogue, social as well as artistic, almost from the very start.

As a painter he was taken seriously and received his meed of praise with few dissenting voices. Almost every one in the press and magazines hailed him as the much-needed person--the man who technically knew how to paint. His pictures at no time ever sold very well, but that was for the reason perhaps that they never possessed an intimate human interest, not because they were indifferently painted. On the whole, though some of the elders looked askance at his broad brushing, or thought his themes somewhat material and superficial, he had no grievance of a Whistler kind against either critic or public. The art clubs elected him to membership, he spent his first summer after his return in a trip through the Erie Canal with the Tile Club, in 1880 he became a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1883 its president. The same year he had organized and sent to Munich the first group of American pictures for exhibition there.

A curiosity as to how art had been produced by other people, in other times and countries as well as our own, was always with Chase. He was a great traveller, a great student of art, a great haunter of galleries and museums. In the thirty or more years that I knew him I had met him at different times in almost every gallery of Europe. Only a year or so before the Great War I was working in the Uffizi one hot July afternoon after every one had left the place. I had been alone for several hours when I heard steps approaching me down the long corridor. It was late and one of the attendants was probably coming to tell me it was time to close. But no; instead of that I heard in very good English:

“At it again, I see! At it again!”

I turned around to find Chase standing there. He, too, had stayed on in the heat after the crowd had gone, and had no doubt been prying into some Titian or questioning some Rembrandt or Rubens!

For many years he kept voyaging to Europe summer after summer. I never chanced to cross with him, but one spring, while bidding farewell to some friends who were sailing, I saw Chase jump out of a cab and scramble up the landing-stage--the last man to arrive--and still giving some directions over his shoulder to his colored man, who remained on the dock. On every steamer he sailed in he organized art, painted the cabin or smoke-room panels, sketched the captain, and made a portrait of the ship’s beauty. Arrived in Europe, he went to see not only exhibitions and museums but brothers of the craft in their studios. He spoke no French, Spanish, or Italian, and had only a limited vocabulary in German, but that made no difference. He got on better with Boldini and Alfred Stevens in Paris using the sign language than with Whistler in London exchanging biting English. Everywhere he was welcomed and treated as a man of distinction in his profession, and everywhere he saw something new and was perhaps influenced thereby.

He was eager to learn and susceptible to impression--so much so that he was said to have followed at different times Leibl, Stevens, Rico, Fortuny, Whistler; but the things which Chase followed were minor matters of handling or arrangement and did not affect his personal point of view. They were superficial fancies and were soon merged, fused, or abandoned. Some of the old masters, Velasquez, Titian, Hals, Rembrandt, had a stronger influence upon him, but these men he never tried to follow. It was their high artistic plane that gave him inspiration. Standing before Titian’s “Young Englishman” in the Pitti, his admiration for its superb poise and lofty dignity was unbounded. It was faultless and flawless intellectually and technically. The left eye was out of drawing, but Titian intended it so. It gave the face more character. He never even wanted to suspect that the restorer in the cleaning-room was perhaps responsible for the bad drawing of the eye. Titian was above criticism.

Chase was never mean in his enthusiasms. He loved whole-heartedly. Before Velasquez at Madrid everything was just as it should be. He was the greatest of them all--the master craftsman of the craft; in the Louvre he protested that no one had ever equalled or approached such still-life painting as that of Chardin; at Haarlem he was just as unstinted in praise of Frans Hals. And he was right about them all. He was a very good judge of pictures and picked out no questionable masters for admiration. Where he found a great masterpiece in a gallery, there he unslung his kit, sat down, and made a copy. He at different times produced very remarkable copies of Velasquez, Hals, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ribera, Watteau. Whatever past art had to teach, Chase was eager to learn. He kept a receptive mind and a live interest in all phases of painting, and had more inherent knowledge of craftsmanship than any of his contemporaries. The literary history of art he knew nothing about, and probably could not have told within a hundred years when Velasquez or Hals was born. That side of art has small interest for artists, and for Chase it was more or less of a blank space.

His summer trips to Europe began in 1881, when he went to Paris and Madrid, making in the latter city a copy of the “Tapestry Weavers.” The next year he was again in Spain with Blum and Vinton. At that time Madrid was a great place for brass, pictures, stuffs, curios, and Chase bought without stint. He needed materials for still-life pictures and, besides, the big Tenth Street studio absorbed no end of furnishings. The summer of 1883 found him in Holland, living at Zandvoort with Blum, and painting Blum in a large garden-picture called “The Tiff.” In 1885 he went to see Whistler in London. They started out on terms of mutual admiration, painted each other’s portraits, travelled in Holland together, but finally ended up by quarrelling. The Whistler portrait of Chase has disappeared, or at least its whereabouts, if it still exists, is unknown; but the Chase portrait of Whistler is extant and now in the Metropolitan Museum. Whistler declared it “a monstrous lampoon,” and he was about right in saying so. It is Whistler the _poseur_, not the real man. Certain eccentricities or personal peculiarities were so extravagantly presented that the characterization became little less than caricature.

In 1886 Chase was married to Miss Gerson and for a few years the European trips were abandoned. He was still teaching in the League, was president of the Society of American Artists, and was holding exhibitions of his work at the Boston Art Club and elsewhere. He began doing some open-air pastels in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. A small club called the “Painters in Pastel” had been organized in New York with Blum as president, and Chase, Beckwith, La Farge, Twachtman, Weir, Wiles as members. Chase became interested in the gay color-possibilities of the medium and proceeded to apply it to park scenes with children, flowers, water, and trees. Years before, Alfred Stevens had told him that his Munich scheme of light was too dark and Chase immediately began to lighten it. Perhaps the medium of pastel finally drove out the last vestige of Munich, for certainly his open-air pictures, without suggesting _pointillisme_ or impressionism or optical mixture of any kind, took on very light and brilliant colorings. They were charming expositions of color and sunlight, and were regarded at the time as something of a departure.

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.

It was perhaps a shortcoming of Chase’s art that he insisted upon merely seeing his subject and not thinking about it. The appearance to him was everything, the reflection or thought about it nothing. Yet the pictures of his that people like best are the ones where some thinking was done. The mother portrait is the instance just given, and better still than that perhaps is the “Woman with a White Shawl,” now in the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts. The latter is beautifully drawn and painted, rightly placed on the canvas, true in values, technically as nearly right as anything Chase ever did, but, oddly enough, one does not think of it technically nor regard it at first decoratively. It is the fine humanity of it--the eternal womanly--that catches the fancy. It is the portrait of a sensitive, refined American woman--in a way the ideal of a type that every American has seen or at some time has known about. Chase, with all his talk about dealing with surfaces only, sometimes talked the other way and expanded on character. He knew the paint-brush could go beneath the surface, for his own brush occasionally brought up astonishing results. The “Woman with a White Shawl” in its fine sympathy and inherent refinement of character may be regarded as Chase’s high-water mark in portraiture. His portraits of men like those of Louis Windmuller, Dean Grosvenor, Robert Underwood Johnson, hardly reach up to it. They lack interest.

At the same time with the “Woman with a White Shawl” he did the “Alice,” now in the Chicago Art Institute--a young girl with a ribbon thrown back of her shoulders almost like a skipping-rope. But this is just the ordinary Chase--that is, an excellent and well-drawn and rightly painted girl of twelve moving across the room with a smiling, somewhat unintelligent, face. The only thinking that Chase put in this picture was in regard to the action or movement of the figure. The rest was merely so much still-life painted for its surface texture as one might paint a brass bucket or the scales of a fish. And yet the “Alice” is an excellent picture and exhibits Chase’s theory of art quite perfectly. But it also demonstrates the truth that the sum of art does not lie on the surface, that the model alone is possibly not sufficient in itself to make up the highest kind of pictorial beauty, and that the intellectual and emotional nature of the painter is a potent factor in all great art. Chase at heart knew that. Titian’s portraits had convinced him of it years before.

In the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.]

Honors, prizes, and medals were coming to him, his teaching was very successful, he had a large following, and was thought the most considerable of our art leaders; but beneath the surface all was not so placid or so pleasant. In 1895 he was no longer president of the Society, he gave up his Brooklyn class, and also his Tenth Street studio. Artistic extravagance or want of revenue or some other financial disability had placed him in straitened circumstances. All of his pictures and collections had to be sold to pay his debts. With characteristic indifference he gave a farewell dinner in the big studio before leaving it, gathered together what possessions remained to him in a house in Stuyvesant Square, and shortly thereafter, with his family and a number of pupils, went to Spain.

In June he returned to Shinnecock, and in the autumn took a studio at Fifth Avenue and Thirtieth Street, and opened at Fifty-seventh Street the Chase School. This school soon became the New York School of Art, and Chase was at its head for eleven years. He also went on teaching at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, going over to Philadelphia every week for the purpose. Then for half a dozen years he taught and painted at Shinnecock with little travel interspersed. It was during these years that he did the “Grey Kimono” and the “Red Box,” portraits arranged with Japanese accessories that showed brilliant coloring, swift handling, and rather superficial characterization. There was none of the Japanese spirit or even method about them. Then, too, he did many shore pieces and views of the sea with the Shinnecock dunes in the foreground. In these pictures he often placed in the first plane small children in white, with a note of color in hats or ribbons, or a reading woman with a bright parasol. The bright spots of color lent brilliancy of effect and the white dresses gave a high pitch of light. They were very attractive pictures, and some of the seas put in the backgrounds had notes of power about them; but usually the product was merely a handsome decorative pattern--just what the painter intended it should be.

Occasionally, too, while at Shinnecock, Chase painted views of the sea, unadorned or unalloyed by beach or shore or people, that were very effective in wave movement and color. He had a finer feeling for color and texture than Winslow Homer but he never had Homer’s grasp of power. In his studio at Shinnecock he painted portraits, genre, and still-life--some of the last being fish. Here, in still-life, with his cunning handling and with color and texture as the chief motive, he appeared to great advantage. By many people his fish-painting is regarded as his highest achievement. In no less than half a dozen museums in the United States he is represented by still-life pictures in which the bulk, the weight, the limpness of dead fish are convincingly shown, but where perhaps greater emphasis is thrown on the slippery wet surfaces with their iridescent colorings. A few years before he died, in showing a new fish-picture in his studio he remarked to me with some deprecation in his manner that he supposed after he was gone he would be known as a fish-painter! He had made the same protest to others.

A short trip to London was taken in 1902. His pupils had asked him to sit to Sargent for his portrait and he did so. The portrait was afterward given to the Metropolitan Museum, where it now hangs. Chase greatly admired Sargent’s sureness and facility and often referred his students to Sargent’s portraits for their study. He was always generous in recognition of good work, even where perhaps he did not like the worker’s point of view, as with Boldini, for example. Sargent and Boldini could outfoot him on his own ground, but that did not matter. He could still cheer for them.