Arts and Letters

In the death, on October 25, 1916, of William Merritt Chase, the American Academy of Arts and Letters lost a member who had been one of the foremost figures in American art for nearly forty years and a painter of international reputation for at least a quarter of a century. From the moment of his return to this country, in 1878, from his studies in Munich he became a leader of what was then the younger school, and during all succeeding changes he never lost his dominating position. As a teacher he probably exercised a wider influence on American painting than any other artist has ever done.

He painted a great variety of subjects, from the nude figure, through portrait, genre, and landscape, to still life; and in a variety of manners, now precise and minute and again broad and even summary, dark and bituminous in tone in his early work, later often cool and bright, more generally in an intermediate tone neither somber nor over-brilliant. But with all the appearance and the presence of versatility, there is yet a singular unity in all his work, and a perfectly definite point of view, which never changes.

He was entirely of his time, that latter third of the nineteenth century, which was essentially naturalistic in its aims, and he never attempted to paint anything more than can be seen with the bodily eye. After his first few costume pieces, he scarcely went so far as to arrange the things he would paint, but preferred to take what came as it came, knowing that wherever he might be, there could be no lack of good, paintable material all about him, and devoting his acute vision and his skilled hand to the registering of his discoveries of the world in which he lived.

Yet, naturalist as he was in his choice of materials, he entirely escaped that besetting danger of naturalism, the scientific temper. He was never among the strenuous investigators of form or light or color; he was essentially the painter, using so much of the attainments of his time as he could readily compel to his own end of facile production, but with no notion of sacrificing his art that his successors might benefit by the invention of new tools or the acquisition of greater knowledge. Possessed of great energy and bodily vigor, of a cool, if keen, vision and of extraordinary technical ability, unbiased by theories and untroubled by emotion, never attempting more than he could do easily, however difficult the doing of it might be to others, he poured forth with a genial fecundity a long series of works, ever new, yet ever the same, demonstrations of his lively interest in the differing aspects of nature and of his even livelier joy in the exercise of his own powers. His message to the world was no other than that simple yet profound one which Stevenson expressed in his Child's Garden of Verses:

The world is so full of a number of things, I am sure we should all be as happy as kings.

Few of us can have been happier than Chase himself, whose life was devoted to the continuously successful accomplishment of tasks in which he delighted.

Profoundly convinced of the truth that the business of a painter is to paint,—inclined, perhaps, to the more doubtful belief that the sole business of a painter is to paint,—the same qualities that made William M. Chase seem revolutionary and protestant in his youth, when painting was lingeringly academic, literary, and sentimental, made him a conservative in his age, when painting was trying to purge itself of its representative element and to transform itself into an art of pure expression. At both extremes his influence was a wholesome one. It was well for us in America, in his early time, to be taught that it is not enough to have feelings, ideas, and knowledge, that one must also learn one's trade. It is well for all the world to-day to be reminded that the art of painting exists, that it is by its nature an imitative art, and that just observation and beautiful workmanship must always have their place in it and will always retain their value.

As man, as artist, and as teacher he had lived his life, had done what he had to do and said what he had to say. We who knew him will miss the invigorating contact with his intensely vital personality, but a longer life would scarcely have added greatly to the sum of what he was. His place in American art is fixed, and as long and as widely as that art may interest mankind, so long and so widely will his name be remembered.