William Merritt Chase 1849-1916

William Merritt Chase married Alice Gerson in 1886 and spent the next few summers painting near their home in Brooklyn.  The artist's new wife often appears in his impressionistic works of this period (figure 1) and may be the woman depicted in On the Lake, Prospect Park.  The rolling meadows, small ponds and stone bridges of Prospect Park, designed by Frederick Law Olmstead and Calvert Vaux who also laid out Central Park, provided endless subject matter for Chase's plein air paintings.  These great urban spaces were designed to meet the recreational needs of all classes, but more specifically the parks provided an escape for the newly prosperous leisure class from the confines of their urban environment.  Chase’s candid and unsentimental portrayals of everyday life attracted favorable notice from Kenyon Cox who described the artist’s Brooklyn scenes as, “veritable little jewels…marvelous little masterpieces…far and away the best things Mr. Chase has yet done, and…altogether charming” (Ronald G. Pisano, Summer Afternoons: Landscape Paintings of William Merritt Chase, Boston, Massachusetts, 1993, p. 10).  At the stylistic heart of these distinctively American images lay Chase’s awareness and assimilation of the changing artistic currents of his time.

Contemporary critics appreciated the particularly American character of Chase’s pictures set in the parks of New York and Brooklyn, enthusiastically approving of the artist’s choice of native subject matter in an age when a taste for things European prevailed.  Widely versed in the works of his European contemporaries, Chase was familiar not only with the French Impressionists whom he had met on his trips abroad, but also with an international coterie of artists that included Alfred Stevens and James Tissot.  The easy elegance captured in On the Lake, Prospect Park reveals Chase’s intimate knowledge of the work of these fashionable painters and unites the inspiration of an earlier generation of European artists with the taste and sensibility of turn-of-the-century America.