William Merritt Chase: Off to Sea

"Seascape with Boats" by William Merritt Chase

"When William Chase was about fifteen or sixteen his father, who was a shoe dealer, took him into his shop as a clerk. But the boy spent so much time drawing on the wrapping paper and paid so little attention to customers that his father began to regard his erratic and useless son as a visitation of Providence. It was evident that young Chase did not have his heart in the shoe business. He was likely to slip out of the shop at the most crowded hour to look at the works of art displayed in a neighboring shop window. He used to stand enraptured; hoping, he said, that some day he might be able to paint like that, yet fearing that he could never attain to such heights of achievement. Imagine now, Chase the master, standing enthralled before a lithograph in a window!

As he grew older, with a restlessness born of the fact that he had not yet found the thing his nature demanded, the boy decided that he would like to be a sailor, and begged his father to let him enter the navy. He consulted with another dissatisfied clerk in his father's store, and they both decided that they would begin as sailors, from which humble position their virtues and talents would soon raise them to the admiralty. 'For Merritt always had the idea of being somebody of importance in the world,' his mother said.

The father, glad to have his son interested in something more tangible and lucrative than art, gave his consent, and William and his friend boarded a train for Annapolis. The two boys were accepted and placed on the school ship 'Portsmouth' which was then starting on a three-months' cruise. But very soon after the ship had left land Chase found that he had made a sad mistake. On the ship he was not very popular. One of the petty officers disliked the absent-minded boy and made him perform all the unpopular tasks. The sailors were rather a rough lot and William Chase, an artist to the soul, was thoroughly unhappy among them.

When the tale of the boy's suffering had been poured into his father's ear, the man travelled in person to New York to obtain his son's discharge. So moved was he by his son's pathetic story that he not only bought his son a new suit of clothes, but took both boys out to dinner and the theatre before reinstating him as clerk in his shoe shop."

To be continued

("The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase," by his former student, Katharine Metcalf Roof, was published in 1917.)