William Merritt Chase and the French connection

Magazine Antiques, July, 2000 by Barbara Dayer Gallati

Most of the critics classified the astonishing variety of works in the exhibition in a fairly simplistic way The figure painters, especially Manet, Edgar Degas, and Gustave Caillebotte, were deemed to be the boldest, most brutal, or "masculine" of the group, while the landscapists--Claude Monet, Eug[acute{e}]ne Boudin, Bet-the Morisot, and occasionally Pierre Auguste R Renoir--were categorized as more "feminine." As one writer put it, "the tenderness and grace of impressionism are reserved for its landscapes; for humanity there is only the hard brutality of the naked truth." [15] Reviewers repeated these sentiments consistently, with the bulk of the praise going to the landscapists:

The landscape side of Impressionism reveals a new world of art. The figure subjects and the landscapes have in common their truth, their magnificent handling, their strength of color and, in some cases, their intentional neglect of tone. But here the analogy ends. The complex problems of human life which make the figure subjects so terrible in their pessimism seem to fill the air with cries of uneasy souls, have no part in the landscapes. These are wholly lovely, with the loveliness of repose and the tenderness of charity. They are full of a heavenly calm. [16]

Certainly Degas's debauched caf[acute{e}] denizens (see Pl. IV), and his "ballet compositions, with their vicious, ugly-faced women, pathetic to the last degree, [which] are like nothing so much as modem Parisian sabbats at which Satan presides," were hardly exemplary subjects for conservative American viewers who shrank from scenes that corresponded with their stereotyped notions of the vulgarity of Parisian life. [17]

It is clear that Chase adhered to the "feminine" branch of impressionism. His taste is no better demonstrated than by his acquisition of Morisot's Lady at her Toilet (Art Institute of Chicago), which was in the 1886 exhibition and was "by many, reckoned to be the finest picture [there]." [18] Morisot was singled out as having "furnished the only truly refined figure work" in the exhibition. [19] The same writer extolled Monet and Renoir particularly for their "flowers, women, children, [and] all things of nature's making."

Strong parallels emerge at this time between Chase's paintings and those of the French painters considered by the critics to be among the purveyors of more refined subject matter. A case in point is the relationship between the works by Monet and Chase shown in Plates VIII and IX. In each case the radical nature of the pictorial space is softened by the centrally positioned child and cheerfully colored garden. [20] To be sure, Caillebotte rendered space similarly, but in his hands compositions were more daringly abstract. Yet Chase a short time later became equally radical in Wash Day (Pl. XI), but again he mitigated the effect by focusing on a purely domestic subject.

Perhaps the strongest effect of the 1886 exhibition on Chase's work was his incorporation of American urban parks into his subject matter. He was almost alone at the time in focusing on sites of public leisure. [21] George Seurat's complete study for A Sunday Afternoon on La Grande Jatte (possibly the one shown in Pl. XIII) and twelve untitled studies presumably for the painting, as well as Renoir's paintings of women in parklike settings (see Pl. XII) provided points of departure for Chase as he reinvented his artistic reputation. It must be said that Chase emphasized the gentility of American public spaces and people's good behavior in them. Using avant-garde compositional features, plein-air methods, and subjects drawn from contemporary life (see Pl. XVI), he arrived at an expression of modernity that was closely related to the work of Morisot (see P1. XV).