William Merritt Chase: American Student in Munich, Pt. 1

"Meditation" by William Merritt Chase

"William Merritt Chase reached Munich at the time when new ideas were germinating. He entered the Munich Royal Academy and was also a student in the studio of Karl von Piloty, a painter of vast canvases, historical in subject, who was then believed to be a great master. But, although he studied with Piloty and Kaulbach, it was William Leibl who influenced Chase and the other impressionable young students in the seventies. 

That, as has been said, was at the beginning of the migration of American art students to Germany. American portrait painters had gone to Europe to study from the days of Sir Joshua Reynolds and Benjamin West, but to England, not to the Continent. Before the Civil War, Italy was the Mecca of sculptors and artists. Romantic creations in marble as well as copies of Madonnas and Magdalenes were brought home in those days, and accorded a respect which real art fails to inspire today.

Doctor Charles Miller, a National Academician who had gone to Munich in 1867, was practically the first American painter to go to Munich, He returned to America in 1870, the year that Frank Duveneck arrived at the Bavarian city. C. S. Reinhart, a Pennsylvania painter and illustrator, went there about the same time.

After the Franco-Prussian War a number of American art students went to Paris and Munich, but the Munich influence seems to have been felt in American art a little before the French school made its impression. There were about forty American students in Munich at the time Chase went there, but soon the number was increased to seventy, Frederick Dielman and William Chase registered at the Royal Academy the same day." 

To be continued

(Excerpts are from "The Life and Art of William Merritt Chase" by Katharine Metcalf Roof.)