William Merritt Chase 1849 - 1916

Berry-Hill Galleries, New York
Thomas Mellon Evans, New York, circa 1972 (acquired from the above)
Gifted to the present owner, by 1976

In 1879, William Merritt Chase returned home to America following six years of study abroad in Munich where he had trained largely in the traditions of French realism and the Barbizon School.  He returned to an American public not wholly unaware of his work; the paintings he had sent back for exhibitions during his absence had earned him both critical and popular recognition.  The Art Students League in New York formalized this growing reputation by offering Chase a teaching position in 1878, which he quickly accepted. Renting a prominent space at the Tenth Street Studio Building and exhibiting his works at every opportunity, Chase continued to earn critical acclaim, most notably for his portraits and figurative paintings, while the few landscapes he attempted had more limited success.  His summers were routinely spent painting in Europe, and the canvases he produced during this time focus predominantly on the European subject matter encountered during his travels, not only because it was immediately available to him, but also because it was more commercially successful in the American art market.

However, beginning in 1885, Chase began a series of views of the parks in Brooklyn which marked a notable departure from his previous work.  While the choice of subject matter was without precedent among American artists at the time, these canvases were also executed in a much higher key than Chase's traditional palette, and more dramatically structured - with strong diagonals whose directional recession opened up his compositions. As Chase himself observed, new artistic imperatives were on the horizon, and "modern conditions and trends of thought demand modern art for their expression" ("The Import of Art. By William M. Chase. An Interview with William Pach", The Outlook 95, June 1910).  By the 1880s, this siren call of modernity demanded two things: contemporary subject matter (primarily landscape) and open-air painting.  Chase's park views reflected his inimitable mastery of both, and by the late 1880's his position as one of America's leading en plein air painters was firmly established.   Accordingly, when a group of women living on the eastern end of Long Island conceived the idea for a school focused on modern landscape and the open air painting they had glimpsed during travels abroad, Chase was the natural and obvious choice as the school's director.  

The Shinnecock Hills Summer Art School ran from 1891-1902 with Chase and his family in residence at the Stanford White-designed house and studio.  Nestled amongst nearly 4,000 acres of brush and sand dunes dotted by the occasional diminutive tree, the school was immediately well-attended by students who boarded at the nearby Art Village.  Teaching classes on Monday and Tuesday, Chase had the remaining days of his week free for his own painting, which he took to with newly-charged enthusiasm. The landscapes he executed during this period occupy a discrete and rarified place within Chase's oeuvre, as the artist's impressionist style reached its apogee.

The horizontal format of The Old Sand Road features two nearly equal registers of land and sky split by a central horizon line.  The rigorous diagonal of the eponymous road cuts through the foreground before extending into the distant rolling dunes, thus creating a compositional tension which invites the viewer to physically enter the picture plane.  Chase's eldest daughter sits off to the left, her red cap and stocking (known as the artist's "red note"), carefully balancing the cooler, recessive hues of the landscape in which she is positioned. Gradually the viewer's eye is led to the white dress of Chase's younger child who stands by the bushes at center, and then to the barely visible farmhouse in the distance at far right.  Chase was particularly captivated by Shinnecock's transitory, cloud-filled sky, rendered here with variegated shades of white, grey, pink and blue which deftly record the ephemeral light of this specific afternoon climate.  Chase's commitment to documenting his environment exactly as he experienced it was perhaps best summarized by his student at Shinnecock, Rockwell Kent, who observed: "[He} went to nature, stood before nature and painted it as his eyes beheld it" (Rockwell Kent, It's Me O Lord, New York, 1955, p. 76).  Along with Chase's devotion to creating a visual record and his efforts to capture the nuances of light and atmosphere, his work displays the dexterous choices of an artist in full command of his style. In so doing, the artist not only successfully portrayed the warm and languid quality of a summer afternoon, but created a work which represents him at his best as an impressionist and landscape painter.