William Merritt Chase and James McNeill Whistler, Pt. 3

Chase (on the left) and Whistler

After a volatile trip with Whistler to Holland, during which they went their separate ways, Chase was about to depart from London, when he received a letter from Whistler:

"This is a disappointment, though only a temporary one, to me most certainly so far as your portrait goes for I should have liked you to have taken it over with you and shown it on your arrival. But in these matters I never deceive myself, and I saw at one on my return from abroad that the work is not in its perfect condition, and Whistler cannot allow any canvas stamped with the butterfly to leave his studio until he is thoroughly satisfied with it himself.

Therefore, my dear Colonel, I shall keep the picture here and bring it over with me to finish in your studio where again I will prove to you that my long suffering is equal to your own as I stand in my turn till you finish... Under the circumstances I send you back the thirty pounds you had given me on your portrait - trust me it is better so - it would only make me nervous and unhappy were I to keep it before my work pleased me.

So we must reserve them, screening them from the eye of jealous mortals on both sides of the Atlantic until they burst upon the painters in the swagger of completeness. This is a disappointment, though only a temporary one, to me most certainly so far as your portrait goes for I should have liked you to have taken it over with you and shown it on your arrival."

But Whistler never managed to come, and Chase did not wait forever to show his portrait of Whistler in New York. When he did, "Whistler was enraged. In the press reviewers commented on how Chase was so good at capturing both Whistler and Whistler's style that it seemed like a send-up. Whistler caught wind of that and was extremely insulted. He called Chase's painting 'a monstrous lampoon,' and broke up the friendship. As the story goes Whistler complained about Chase for the rest of his life"* and nobody knows what happened to his portrait of Chase.

To be continued

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

*Quote from Erica Hirshler, art curator at the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston. https://www.wbur.org/news/2016/11/02/one-portrait-broke-up-whistler-chase