Chase, the eclectic collector.(Current and coming)

William Merritt Chase was one of the most versatile and intriguing American artists working around the turn of the twentieth century. Always a fierce individualist with a flair for the exotic, his preferred painting method called for bypassing preliminary drawings and oil sketches in favor of the au premier coup technique. He also had a passion for collecting in his studio just the right objects both to use as props in his paintings and to create a striking ambiance for his many visitors. The melange of objects visible in both his paintings and photographs of his studios indicate that he was not a purist when it came to collecting, preferring instead to mix Italian Renaissance furniture with Oriental screens, Japanese porcelains, Turkish lighting devices, and other bibelots from all over the globe, chosen more for color and texture than for age or rarity. The placement of objects on tables and other surfaces created interiors that were aptly described by one of his students as a "series of still lifes." When financial difficulties forced Chase to send the contents of his studio to auction in 1896, the sale comprised eighteen hundred lots.

An exhibition focusing on Chase as a painter of interiors is on view at Berry-Hill Galleries in New York City from November 15 to January 29, 2005. The show is entitled Chase Inside and Out: The Aesthetic Interiors of William Merritt Chase and includes more than thirty paintings on loan from museums and private collectors. A selection of more than twenty photographs of the artist, members of his family, his studios, and his residences is also on view.

Bruce Weber relates in his insightful essay in the exhibition catalogue that in 1878, after spending six years in Europe, Chase settled in New York City in an inside studio in the legendary Tenth Street Studio Building. He decorated it with an eclectic mixture of objects, many of them purchased abroad. In the latter part of 1879, Chase seized an opportunity to make a bigger splash in the art world by leasing the large outer studio in the building that had formerly been rented to Albert Bierstadt, who used the large glass-ceilinged room for the display of his monumental scenes of the American West. Here the open house Chase held ...