Right out Under the Sky

Chase_The Big Bayberry Bush

William Merritt Chase, The Big Bayberry Bush, c. 1895. Oil on canvas, 25 1/2 x 33 1/8 in. Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, New York, Littlejohn Collection

A true plein-air artist, William Merritt Chase painted right out “under the sky,” working directly on the canvas to capture his immediate impressions of the area surrounding his home in Shinnecock Hills, where he taught annually from 1891 to 1902. Completed about midway through his Shinnecock years, The Big Bayberry Bush is a singular example of how Chase distilled “the harmony which I see in nature.” With an eye for color and spatial arrangement, Chase positions his three eldest daughters in bright white frocks with colored accessories playing near a bayberry bush in a flat, open terrain of brush and sand dunes near their summer home. Their varying poses and placements in the scene create a dynamic, triangular movement that leads the viewer’s eye in a zig-zag line from the foreground to the distant Stanford White-designed shingle-style home on the distant horizon before resting on the serene blue sky above. The warm burnt umber tones against the cool grays and pale azure sky suggest the passing of summer into early autumn. A critic later praised the work for “its admirable atmospheric effect, and for the deft description of summer sunshine.”

Elsa Smithgall, Exhibition Curator

At Home with William Merritt Chase

Chase_Hall at Shinnecock

William Merritt Chase, Hall at Shinnecock, 1892. Pastel on canvas, 32 1/8 x 41 in. Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection. On view in William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master through September 11, 2016

One of William Merritt Chase’s finest interiors, Hall at Shinnecock (1892) is a glowing testament to the artist’s virtuosity as a pastel painter. In this resplendent scene of domestic leisure, Chase captures his wife and two of their children in the great hall of their Shinnecock home during the second season Chase taught at the Shinnecock Summer School of Art. During his visit there the next year, writer John Gilmer Speed was struck by how “the hall makes a picturesque entrance to the house and studio. It rises through both stories to the roof . . . Pictures and tapestries hang on the walls . . . As the front door opens to a visitor, an Aeolian harp tinkles a welcome till the door is shut again. Then the visitor sees that he is not in the conventional house, but in one designed for picturesque effects in furnishings.”

Hall at Shinnecock is also a brilliant homage to one of Chase’s favorite old masters, 17th-century Spanish painter Diego Velázquez. Borrowing a pictorial device from Velázquez’s famous Las Meninas, Chase paints his own reflection in the mirrored doors of the black antique Dutch armoire at the far end of the room. Like the central Infanta Margaret Theresa, the turned head and intent gaze of Chase’s older daughter acknowledges the protagonist who lingers outside the physical space of the painting.

Elsa Smithgall, Exhibition Curator