Daniela M. Addamo, May 19, 2021
William Merritt Chase’s (1849-1916) eclecticism was instrumental in creating a hybrid between the old and new world. Chase’s work reflects influences from the Old Masters, French Impressionists, and the Munich School, however maintains originality. By implementing selective techniques of European styles within an American subject matter, Chase is able to differentiate a new current in American modern art.
We Americans can feel justly proud of the showing our men and women have made, are making in the art world, and I do not make an exaggerated statement when I assert that there are no better. The people of this country have begun to set aside their unjust prejudice to American art, and are now placing examples of our best artists in their collections. Our artists are also employed for the first time in doing important mural decorations, all of which is proving entirely satisfactory to all concerned.
Original Notes of William M. Chase on his Talk to his Student in Philadelphia.” in Ronald G. Pisano. The Leading Spirit in American Art: William Merritt Chase 1849-1916. Washington: Henry Art Gallery, University of Washington, 1983: 175.
Although it may be a challenging goal, Ronald Pisano offers a treatise on the subject of William Merritt Chase’s “Americanness” and attributes characteristics of such to Chase’s cosmopolitan eclecticism.
Though heavily influenced by painting from Holland and Spain while at the Munich Academy of Fine Arts from 1872-78, Chase and his colleagues kept a sense of American patriotism. They began forming an American Art Club notably including Frank Duveneck (1848-1919) and Frank Currier who played major roles. The club included meetings during which the artists would criticize and analyze each other’s works as well as work of the Old Master’s, and more importantly discuss the issue of an “American art.” One could argue that this was the inception of Chase’s lifelong mission in forming a type of American art, stemming from a strong spirit of nationalism. Chase and his fellow American students were determined in keeping their patriotism alive by hosting visiting dignitaries such as Mark Twain, and celebrating American holidays such as Thanksgiving and Independence Day. The group placed the most importance on their Independence Day celebrations, which were bacchanalian in nature. The American Art Club would spare no detail in the festivities which took place in the Hotel Detzer. Paintings depicting the American nation’s history were hung, the American flag was surrounded by flowers and paintings by Chase, and patriotic speeches and the singing of American songs concluded the celebration.
Munich Academy of Fine Arts, 1900 
Photograph of Frank Duveneck, 1877
Pisano expands further in describing the process of identifying Chase’s abundant influences with a formula of analyzing each of his work individually, where one would have to meticulously dissect characteristics from artists and time periods in which the work possesses. This paper will use a similar formula of analyzing Chase’s Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler (1883) in order to investigate various influences and characteristics that place this painting within the new current of American art during the late nineteenth century.
Although Chase was a cosmopolitain artist and internationalist who represented European influence, Richard J Boyle firmly states that Chase is credited for being involved in and contributing to everything in the American art world of his day and even “solved the problem of the ‘alienated’ American artist’ through his “constant activity in almost every phase of American art..who was one of the most important artistic personalities in American art.” Boyle further explains:
If Mary Cassatt thought J. Alden Weir would start an American school of painting, and if there ever was such a thing, Chase was it. From the era of the Philadelphia Centennial, to the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where six of his canvases were exhibited, Chase was the embodiment of nearly every artistic influence exerted on American painters in his time: still lifes and portraits in the manner of the National Academy, the silvery tonalities of Whistler, the bituminous bluster of Munich, the seventeenth century Spanish and Dutch, the suavity of Manet and Sargent, the bright color and broken brushwork of Impressionism, all of which he utilized at one time or another and, it seems at one and the same time. He was quite obviously an eclectic; but he was a brilliant virtuoso who, like Duvenneck and Sargent, painted in a broad and spirited manor with a sense of elegance and élan.
Richard J. Boyle. “The Second Half of the Nineteenth Century.” in Wilmerding, John. The Genius of American Painting. New York: William Morrow & Company, INC, 1973: 164
Furthermore, during his own time while President of the Society of American Artists, Chase was described in Godey’s Magazine by W. A. Cooper as “the most complete and distinctive artistic nature of the painters of our time and country.”
Cosmopolitan Eclecticism
Eclecticism had negative connotations until the mid-nineteenth century, especially in the last quarter of the century. It wasn’t until this time period when eclecticism became a representation of cosmopolitain life. By the late-nineteenth century, eclecticism within the home was a shared idea that the American public, mostly the upper middle class, began to strive for. This notion appeared in popular magazines and trade publications, and the upper middle class took advice from these publications on how to harmonize diverse elements in their homes. Ideals about eclecticism shifted from earlier beliefs of being deemed unoriginal or imitative, to a rigorous process of informed choices. In order to avoid seeming too derivative, decorating manuals were produced. The individual had to be knowledgeable on how to “create a meaningful, original assemblage of elements..arranged uniquely.” In one example, Edith Wharton published an extensive manual in 1897, The Decoration of Houses, which meticulously instructed in great detail how one should decorate a home using “bric a brac.” In the American visual culture, eclecticism became the leading aesthetic by the late nineteenth century, with William Merritt Chase’s studios and art becoming the hallmark of this new style. William Merritt Chase was an avid collector who found himself broke on numerous occasions. One in particular was when Chase visited Venice for the first time with his close friend and painter, Frank Duveneck in May of 1877. Chase spent his funds lavishly on purchasing pictures, furniture, frames, pieces of brass, tapestries, brocades and various “bric-a-brac” with which to decorate his apartment.
For the sake of clarification, the operative definition of eclectic will be used in the way Ronald G. Pisano uses it, referring to an “international style of painting, one utilized by artists in both America and in Europe and propagated to a great extent by the many international expositions of the day.”
Chase’s originality comes from selection rather than invention. He “selected the best elements of a system to form a new one.” It wasn’t just about assorting a vast array of styles and decorative objects from other cultures for the sake of being eclectic. The process was much more meticulous than that. Chase also sought to adapt the past to the present.
Chase encouraged his students to “take the best from everything.” In defending claims against his eclecticism for being unoriginal Chase once said, “I have been a thief, I have stolen all my life—I have never been so foolish and foolhardy as to refrain from stealing for fear I should be considered as not ‘original.’ Originality is found in the greatest composite which you can bring together.”
When describing Chase’s work as eclectic, this is in reference to specific European schools, artists, time periods, and American subject matter and influences. Chase’s eclectic style took influence from the Royal Academy of Munich, French Impressionism, English Aesthetic Movement, Holland, Japonism, Old Masters, and Contemporary artists.
Dress Reform & the American Woman
Even with Chase’s European influences, he was referred to as a “full blooded American” (German critic once said when he viewed this work.) He knew how to distinguish and represent the differences between the appearance and mannerisms of Americans versus their European counterparts. According to scholars, the portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler successfully captures a distinctively American type of woman. The German critic went on in describing this painting, “as genuine an American as ever was, handsome moreover, and interesting also, though apparently gifted with more cleverness than feeling. The way in which she fixes her piercing look on you without herself betraying anything, puts you in mind of a sphinx.” Chase was intentional in painting what he considered “typically American.” In addition to Chase’s landscape scenes of Central Park and Prospect Park, his portraits also depicted characteristics that would be relatable and recognizable to New Yorkers. The German critic observed, “the ideal type that every American has seen or at some time has known about.”
Chase also sought to adapt the past to the present. Wheeler is sitting on an Elizabethan revival chair, which Chase modernizes. Unlike the Elizabethan era, the sitter is not sitting stiff with a structured dress. She sits relaxed, resting her head on her left hand, yet with an assertive expression. There are clear elements of the Aesthetic Movement’s dress reform which rejected highly structured and heavily trimmed Victorian corsets. Dress reform began in England in the mid-nineteenth century by figures of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood and Arts and Crafts Movement (figs 3 and 4). This new current which Chase addresses also took place later in America around the 1870s. American women began to speak out against tight-laced corsets, hoop skirts and bustles and advocated for unrestrictive simplicity of design. The sitter is depicted as a modern woman actively engaging in this new reform that corresponds to the “burgeoning new woman”. Chase is depicting a “‘new breed’ of American Women: Sincere, intelligent, direct, and strong; able to make serious judgements and decisions, eligible for a career of her own.”
Unknown Noblewoman Seated in a Chair, Lavinia Fontana, c. 1570-1614, oil on canvas, National Trust, UK. 
Symphony in White, No. 1: The White Girl, James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1862, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. 
Jane Morris (The Blue Silk Dress), Dante Gabriel Rossetti, 1868, oil on canvas, Kelmscott Manor, Kelmscott, UK.
During this time period, it was uncommon for American artists to accept women as private pupils. However, Chase was the exception to this social rule. Chase thoughtfully selected specific aspects from artists and movements he admired. He imparted Whistler’s ideas about creating paintings that were fundamentally decorative and stripped of narrative. However, Chase doesn’t wholly agree with this philosophy and imbues meaning into the painting. The sitter in Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler, Wheeler and her mother launched a successful decorating firm which was one of the first businesses in the country to be operated entirely by women. Chase intentionally imbues meaning as he references her occupation in designing luxurious textiles through the background of the embroidered silk tapestry.
The portrait is similar in composition to Whistler’s painting of his mother. Another title for Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler is Harmony in Blue and Gold. There’s a balance of mostly blue and yellow tones proportionately painted through out the work which evokes Whistler’s concern for whole settings. It’s evident that there is a slight departure from Chase’s training in Munich. His compositions become less cluttered, palettes becomes brighter yet still with a clarity of execution. Like Whistler’s butterfly, Chase includes his own symbolic signature of a running cat hiding in the tapestry.
Munich Style
Chase abandons what is commonly called the “Munich brown sauce,” of dark colors and chiaroscuro. Yet, there are still echoes of Chase’s Munich style in his concern for expressing materiality and attention to the surfaces of objects. Chase still includes deep browns in the bottom strip of the floor and furniture in order to offset the brilliant colors of blue and gold. Like Chase’s earlier painting Unexpected Intrusion (1876) painted while he was executing the Munich style, Chase employs rich colors and textures on the blue ceramic bowl, blue satin dress of Miss Wheeler and golden tone of the brocade.
Unexpected Intrusion (Boy Feeding a Cockatoo; Turkish Page), William Merritt Chase, 1876, oil on canvas, Cincinnati Art Museum, Ohio.
Impressionist Elements
Chase accepted the spirit of Impressionism but not the absolute dogma which he believed was too scientific. Selectively “taking the best of everything,” Chase embraced the fleeting moment, plein air, and lighter color but not extremes of brilliance. He and other American Impressionists implemented what was called “quietism” with a slightly more realistic and vidid treatment of colors. Like the Impressionists, he avoided the romantic and sentimental for more ordinary subject matter. In selecting only some theories of Impressionism without making these ideas the artistic goal, Chase refused to make light the subject, but rather used it as a means to emphasize the objects he wished to paint. In this painting, its unclear where the source of light is coming from although sources confirm Chase had installed a skylight in the roof. Chase manipulates the light in order to achieve an emphasis on texture, such as the reflective properties of the glass bowl and the satin dress.
In the Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler, there are elements of Sargent’s version of Impressionism and Velázquez’s technical approach, who both artists admired greatly (figs 7 and 8). The palette is quieter than the typical luminosity of other Impressionists. Like Sargent and Velázquez, Chase employs the alla prima method of working directly onto the canvas with a loaded brush. His brush strokes are fluid and painterly with flourishes of color recalling Sargent and the Dutch Old Masters, yet he refused to use the Impressionists’ broken color or formlessness of short brush strokes. The fur and satin material of Miss Wheeler’s dress are given expressive character similar to Velázquez’s attention to details of his sitter’s garments.
Chase’s faces, especially female faces are not idealized and in a realistic expressive manner similar to that of Velázquez. Instead of the vacant expressions typically seen in French Impressionist paintings such as A Bar at the Folies-Bergère (1882) (fig 9) Miss Wheeler is fixed with an assertive gaze.
Chase further selects formal elements and techniques from various artists in a manner in which these influences become Chase’s own unique style. The darker tones of the Dutch Old Masters and broken brush strokes of the French Impressionists are rejected. However, the suggestive brushstrokes of Hals are used in a fluid movement, emphasizing the lighter palette Chase took from the Impressionists. Like Velázquez, Hals was a major influence on Chase since he began his artistic education in Munich. In Chase’s painting, Studio Interior (1881) (fig 11), Chase places his own version of Malle Babbe (1633-35) (fig 10) in the very center of his eclectic studio. The central placement signifies the importance this painting by Hals held for Chase, who claimed that it was “one of the finest of Hals’.” The placement also indicates the prominent role that this particular Old Master’s work played in Chase’s artistic development. According to Isabel L. Taube “Chase studied Hals’s paintings in Munich where he developed a technique of loose brushstrokes and daubs of color similar to that of the older artist. By depicting an artwork by another artist, he also paid homage to the tradition of the picture-within-the-picture.”
Orientalism
Although Chase was an avid traveler, his exposure to “Orientalism” came from the contemporary artists and Japanese prints that were circulating in Europe and America. By the 1870s and 80s, Japanese culture was introduced to America and had an immediate impact on art and architecture. The nineteenth century American audience became fascinated with representations of “the Orient” and especially in terms of collecting. To offer a deeper understanding of Chase’s interest in Orientalism, one would have to consider his lavish collecting habits. Chase found himself broke once again in 1896 and was eventually forced to sell all of the exotic objects that filled his studio. It’s important to note that these items not only spoke of Chase’s personality but are representative of the nineteenth century upper middle class culture. According to M. H. Dunlop, “the possessor of an interior and it’s furnishing controls neither their accumulated cultural meanings nor even their personal meanings. Chase had managed to accumulate and store over eighteen-hundred objects, some of which included: six hundred rings, Phoenician glassware, Bohemian ware, Persian ware, Roman goblets, Delftware, Venetian jugs, Mexican vases, thirty-one musical instruments from China, Japan, Africa, Spain and Italy, weapons from Spain, Rome, Germany, Turkey, Java, and India, lanterns from Venice, Persia and Morocco, Japanese teapots, marionettes, masks and rice spoons, Spanish, Dutch, and Chinese furnishings, one Peruvian-Indian mummified head and etc.
When referring to Chase’s exotic and comprehensive collection Dunlop states “in their multiplicity lies their meaning.” Between 1879 and 1896, the collection of Chase’s goods began to point in the direction of Orientalism. Chase’s massive Orientalist collection appeared to be almost identical to the extensive number of French Orientalist paintings of the time period. Furthermore, the objects within the collection that appear frequently in his paintings (and became recognizable to anyone who was familiar with Chase’s work), connected the American readers of the nineteenth century. Most of the middle/upper class audience who visited Chase’s studio and viewed his work were able to draw connections to the popular and beloved texts, Alf Layla Wa Layla, and The Thousand and One Nights. Dunlop’s assessment further demonstrates how Chase’s eclecticism speaks to the core of American culture in the nineteenth century.
It is here that Chase’s studio appears conventional and here that it reveals him as a quite ordinary American consumer in every way..He was attuned to an array of goods, stories, and images with Middle Eastern and North African sources, items interchangeably labeled Persian, Algerian, Turkish, Oriental, and Eastern. When Orientalism did arrive, after 1876, it hit America hard. Within a year of the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition’s display of Orientalist goods, ‘sale-rooms were crowded to their utmost capacity wherever Eastern goods form the attraction.
M. H. Dunlop. “Bargains in Bric-á-Brac.” Gilded City: Scandal and Sensation in Turn-of-the Century New York. New York: HarperCollins Publishers Inc., 2000: 96.
Chase was constantly rearranging his studio. The blue turkish carpet one normally sees in Chase’s studio paintings has been eliminated in Portrait of Miss Dora Wheeler for the sake of including a balancing out the browns within the composition. However, he still integrates Japanese artistic concepts of simple backgrounds and patterns in the embroidery which was selected through the influence of Whistler. Chase includes subtle references to Japonism and Orientalism similar to those often pictured in Alfred Stevens’ (1823-1906) studio paintings (fig 12). Stevens, a Belgian artist, was a close personal friend of Chase. Chase owned several Stevens paintings and frequently arranged his studio paintings in the manner of Stevens. Like Stevens, who often placed Japanese fans and prints in his portraits, Chase offers subtle references to Chinese and Japanese decoration with a carved ebony Chinese tabouret, and faint exotic pattern of animals, flowers, and butterflies, hinting at Whistler, in the tapestry. These references are charged with new meanings as a result that often occurred when eclecticism began to play a major role in nineteenth century American culture. According to Isabel L. Taube, “Americans and Europeans also forced non-western cultures and ideas into Western paradigms. Chase and his American and European contemporaries transformed objects, such as ceramic plates and fans, with particular, sometimes ritual functions, into wall decorations.” The Orientalist objects featured in Chase’s paintings and placed among his studio collection are stripped of context and generate different meanings as their functions are re-contextualized from ritual to decorative. These objects contribute “cultural diversity” to the aesthetic of eclectic ensembles.
William Merritt Chase’s oeuvre was consistently developing throughout his life as his artistic taste grew and expanded. Though derivative, Chase’s work does not imitate other artistic styles, but rather takes part of each style to create his own. Through his highly selective process, Chase’s rigorous eclecticism becomes original. Chase’s eclectic work modernizes the past and imbues his own version of Impressionist philosophy and Munich style of painting onto American subjects while also subtly referencing Orientalist imports. By the mid twentieth century critics and historians began to categorize American artists as either “characteristically American” or “Europeanized.” Critics during Chase’s lifetime comment on how “typically American” his work was. Though the national style of American art may seem challenging to define, a student of the time period proposed “It may be suggested that the answer lies in the example of William Merritt Chase, that eclecticism itself constituted the American style in the last quarter of the nineteenth century.” The scholar Boyle expands further on this quote, “If so, the irony is that what served to unify these men and women was their cosmopolitanism and embracing of international currents in art.”
Daniela Addamo 