Spanish Girl

Oil on Panel

One of the United States’ most celebrated painters, William Merritt Chase was born in eastern Indiana in 1849.  His first art lessons came in 1861, upon his family’s move to Indianapolis.  His teacher, a local painter named Barton Hays, was impressed with Chase’s talent and urged him to study further at the National Academy of Design in New York.  After three years at the Academy, Chase moved to St. Louis, where his parents had relocated.  He devoted himself to still life painting and quickly attracted the attention of two wealthy men who agreed to supply funds for the artist to study at Munich’s Royal Academy of Art.  The Munich School focused on a bravura style of painting, indebted to the seventeenth-century Dutch and Spanish Masters, especially the work of Velázquez and Zurbaran.

Chase excelled at the Munich Academy and was offered a teaching post at the finish of his studies.  His reputation was established before his return to New York in 1878, where he began teaching at the Art Students League.  He rented studio space on West Tenth Street in Manhattan, and filled it with a disparate array of exotic objects; the studio became famous in itself and contributed to Chase’s celebrity.

Chase traveled to Europe in 1881 and visited with Mary Cassatt and John Singer Sargent in Paris.  He also traveled to Madrid and spent a considerable amount of time at the Prado, studying the works of Velasquez in depth.  It is likely that this painting dates from Chase’s time in Spain.  Spanish Girl exhibits the artist’s mastery of the Spanish painting technique.  The paint is applied thickly and with small, quick strokes.  The palette has the dark lushness of the Spanish painters, especially with Chase’s use of a dark background, out of which the girl’s face dramatically emerges.  The subject has the feeling of being caught in a moment of intense study; there is no sense that Chase painted from a posed model, rather, a sense of spontaneity prevails.  The girl’s face and the bloom in her hair are mottled; the tonality of her face, with its subtle touches of pinks and reds, appears fresh and alive, while the flower bursts with sumptuous color.  Spanish Girl is a fine example of Chase’s work from the early 1880s.

Chase experimented with other styles throughout his career (he is often termed the United States’ first impressionist painter), and he was highly regarded as a teacher.  He founded the Chase School of Art (now the Parsons School of Design) and counted among his pupils Georgia O’Keeffe, Edward Hopper, and Rockwell Kent.