EDSITEment

Unlike his expatriate contemporaries
Mary Cassatt, John Singer Sargent
and James McNeill Whistler, the painter
William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) is not
a familiar name, not even to most art lovers
and museum goers. A prodigious talent in
his time both as a painter and as a teacher,
his credo was “paint the commonplace in
such a way as to make it distinguished.”
On the occasion of the centennial of his
death, this exhibition brings together over
70 of Chase’s paintings from all phases of his
long career and so provides a rare opportunity
to consider what made him a “modern
master” and how he reconciled the competing
claims of tradition and modernity.