William Merritt Chase: Artistic Awakening in New York

"The Tenth Street Studio," 1880, by William Merritt Chase

"When William Merritt Chase returned to America in 1878, the hour had struck for the passing of the old, and the coming of the new art. The canvases of the younger men exhibited at the academy, which would have been ignored and laughed at in the zenith of the Hudson River School, came now at the psychological moment when the time was ripe for their recognition and influence.

The art exhibition of the Philadelphia Centennial in 1876, had given American artists a new outlook. The Barbizon painters were quite generally known now, although America had not yet heard the name of Manet. The young men who had been sending their pictures home to the academy were beginning to return from Paris and Munich; prosperity followed the Civil War, and change was in the air.

The preceding year the Society of American Artists had been organized. The Art Students' League was then in Fourteenth Street. The Metropolitan Museum had just moved into its new quarters of the edge of Central Park; in short, the new life had begun.

The presence of the young American painter in a Munich student's hat, accompanied by a picturesque hound or two, did not cause much comment. Yet Chase was a natural creator of bizarre effects. When his servant, Daniel, wearing a red fez, stood outside the entrance of the Tenth Street Studio, and the Russian hound gambolled about the street, and two brilliant-hued macaws and a white cockatoo perched upon the iron railing of the building, the resulting effect was certainly unusual.

Chase accomplished his dream when he acquired his Tenth Street Studio. It was the first real studio building in New York. He first occupied a small studio, but later managed to secure a large room. It was described as 'the sanctum sanctorum of the aesthetic fraternity, affording midst painting, statuary, music, flowers, and flamingoes [stuffed]...never to be forgotten by charmed participants."

To be continued

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