Chase nudes.(Museum accessions)(William Merritt Chase's nude paintings)

When thinking of paintings by William Merritt Chase these days, it is more often his expansive Long Island beach scenes with Peconic Bay skies or the large views of his art-laden studio that come to mind. So to see these small almost quiescent nudes reminds us how very broad and eclectic an artist he was.

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There are only about nine known pastel nudes painted by Chase, several of which were exhibited in the Society of Painters in Pastels exhibitions in 1888 and 1889. He was a founder of this organization in 1882 and one of the American artists who promoted interest in the revival of the medium. The example at the bottom was a recent bequest to the National Gallery of Art in Washington. It is believed to be the one lent by Potter Palmer to an 1897 Chase exhibition in Chicago with the Whistlerian title Study in Flesh Color and Gold.

Chase, who spent much of the summer of 1885 with Whistler in Holland, Belgium, and England, was indeed influenced by him. He was obviously taken with Whistler's subtle tonality and japanesque use of space, which is so evident in this work, as are the wonderful swaths of oriental embroidered silks. Chase coveted these and other decorative textiles, and included examples in a number of his pictures, for example Studio Interior of about 1882 (Brooklyn Museum). It is also interesting to note, however, that in 1885 Chase had gone to Europe to revisit works by Diego Velazquez that he had seen in Spain in 1881. One of the pastels in this small group, a reclining nude once owned by the artist Irving Wiles, portrays the precise back view as Velazquez's Rokeby Venus, privately owned in England in 1885 and now in the National Gallery, London. Chase was far too talented to simply mimic new styles or old; he ...