4
3
("2 *!- %0) *
0 )&//"!/+/%"
0(/3+#/%" +(("$"+# -/. *! &"* ".
+# )"-& **&1"-.&/3
&* -/& (0(#&(()"*/+#
/%"",0&-")"*/.#+-/%" "$-""+#
./"-+# -/.
*
-/&./+-3
% &-
&' (!"-%
*!-" " -.+*%
" *+#/%" +(("$"+# -/. *! &"* ".
April 28, 2021 /"
)"-& **&1"-.&/3
.%&*$/+*
© COPYRIGHT
by
Alexandra Schuman
2021
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
JOHN SINGER SARGENT’S WILLIAM M. CHASE, N.A.: MAKING A CASE FOR
PORTRAIT PAINTING IN THE AGE OF PHOTOGRAPHY
BY
Alexandra Schuman
ABSTRACT
In 1902, students of William Merritt Chase commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint a portrait of their teacher that they intended to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the portrait, Chase stares intently at the viewer with a palette and paintbrushes in hand, presumably pausing in the midst of painting to scrutinize his canvas. Despite this pause in his handiwork, his focused facial expression implies that his mind remains active. By depicting Chase engaged in the mental and perceptive work that precedes the physical handling of paint, Sargent asserted the importance of skilled, artistic observation and refuted critics who characterized both Sargent and
Chase’s work as facile and superficial. At the time, portrait painting was under threat by the increasingly popular automated medium of photography, which provided faster and more accurate depictions of sitters. Sargent’s portrait of Chase emphasizes the importance of observation and discernment and asserts the value of the portrait painter against the rise of photography. The circumstances of this commission presented Sargent with the opportunity to take charge of his own narrative within the genre for which he was most known and in which he held the most professional stake. As a commission intended for the Metropolitan Museum, the preeminent institution for art in America, Chase’s portrait allowed Sargent to align with the museum’s implicit interest in connoisseurship and the value of original works of art. Within this context, by both picturing and fostering close looking, Sargent prompted viewers to consider the intellectual work involved in the portrait’s creation, thereby asserting the value of painting over photography. ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
First and foremost, I would like to thank my advisor, Dr. Nika Elder, for her kindness, guidance, and patience during the course of this project. Her expertise and creativity have spurred my own curiosity and critical thinking in this field. Thank you to my committee member,
Dr. Andrea Pearson, and Dr. Joanne Allen for their advice and encouragement. My wonderful professors in the Art History department have had an indelible effect on my life and career, and I am grateful for their expertise and wisdom. I am also appreciative grants from Carol Bird
Ravenal and the College of Arts and Sciences that enabled me to visit the painting that is the topic of this study.
Lastly, I would like to thank the people who got me through this process: Richard and my friends, for their confidence in me, and my family, who were always there when I needed them.
iii
TABLE OF CONTENTS
ABSTRACT ...... ii
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ...... iii
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS ...... v
INTRODUCTION ...... 1
CHAPTER 1 THE PAINTER’S GAZE IN AN AUTOMATED AGE ...... 9
CHAPTER 2 FRAMING CLOSE LOOKING AT THE METROPOLITAN MUSEUM OF ART ...... 24
CONCLUSION ...... 40
ILLUSTRATIONS ...... 41
BIBLIOGRAPHY ...... 42
iv
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Figure 1: John Singer Sargent, William M. Chase, N.A., 1902. Oil on canvas ...... 41
Figure 2: James Carroll Beckwith, Portrait of William Merritt Chase, 1881-1882. Oil on canvas ...... 41
Figure 3: Eugene Paul Ullman, Portrait of William Merritt Chase in his Studio, 1903. Oil on canvas ...... 41
Figure 4: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Portrait of William Merritt Chase, 1888. Bronze relief ...... 41
Figure 5: John Singer Sargent, In the Generalife, 1912. Watercolor, wax crayon, and graphite on white wove paper ...... 41
Figure 6: William Merritt Chase, The Inner Studio, Tenth Street, 1882. Oil on canvas ...... 41
v
INTRODUCTION
In 1902, Susan Bissell, secretary for the New York School of Art and Shinnecock Hills
Summer School of Art, arranged for John Singer Sargent (1856-1925) to paint a portrait of her employer and former teacher, William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). These efforts were made, according to one reviewer who presumably quoted Bissell, “on account of his unceasing devotion to American students and American art.”1 Bissell and Kate Freeman Clark, another former student, collected small donations from Chase’s students from both schools, as well as from the Art Students League and those who took private lessons from Chase, to meet Sargent’s
$1,000 fee – a considerable discount compared to his usual rate. Bissell planned the sitting at
Sargent’s London studio for early summer of that year when Chase was scheduled to travel to
England.2 Bissell’s correspondence suggests that from the start, the students planned to gift the work to the Metropolitan Museum of Art.3 It was a fairly common practice for artists to raise funds to acquire works by their late colleagues for the museum, but to have a portrait specially commissioned demonstrated distinctive admiration.4
In the finished full-length portrait (1902) (Fig. 1), a distinguished Chase scrutinizes the viewer, a paintbrush and palette in hand. According to Chase biographer Keith L. Bryant, the
1 “Mr. Sargent’s Portrait of Chase,” Century Illustrated Magazine 65 (May 1903): 801.
2 Keith L. Bryant, William Merritt Chase, a Genteel Bohemian (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991), 183–84.
3 Doreen Bolger Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, vol. 3 (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 257–60.
4 Burke, 3:xvii.
1
students “heartily approved” of the finished work, and Chase stated his own pleasure as well.5 A few months later the painting was exhibited at M. Knoedler and Company galleries in New
York, and subsequently in Philadelphia, Boston, Cincinnati, and Chicago. Funds from these shows allowed the students to finish paying Sargent’s fee. The portrait’s last stop was the 1904
World’s Fair in St. Louis before it was presented to the Metropolitan Museum of Art and officially accessioned in 1905. Critics published laudatory reviews of the portrait, praising
Sargent’s technical handling and adept execution. One contemporary critic, Charles H. Caffin described it as “an impression vivid, composite and concise, the net product of a rarely acute and cultivated observation.”6
Picking Sargent to paint Chase is in some ways an obvious choice, for a twofold reason:
Sargent was arguably the most famous American portraitist at the time, and Chase had repeatedly expressed his deep admiration for him.7 Historians such as Barbara Dayer Gallati and
Robert Gates Bardin have traced this admiration to similarities in the artists’ approaches to posing and staging their subjects; both Chase and Sargent cultivated a portrait style that was part casual and part grand manner.8 To have a portrait done by a famous artist such as Sargent was a status symbol, especially since it would be housed within an institution founded by elite
5 Bryant, William Merritt Chase, 183–84; “Girls Get Sargent to Paint Chase: Portrait That Will Attract Much Attention When It Is First Exhibited Next Month,” New York Times, October 19, 1902: 25.
6 Charles H. Caffin, “John Singer Sargent, The Greatest Contemporary Portrait Painter,” World’s Work 7 (November 1903): 4115.
7 Frances Lauderbach, "Notes From Talks by William M. Chase: Summer Class, Carmel-By-the-Sea, California: Memoranda from a Student's Note Book," The American Magazine of Art 8, no. 11 (1917): 433.
8 Barbara Dayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase (New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995) especially pp. 104-112; Robert Gates Bardin, “Posing as a Fine Art: William Merritt Chase’s Portrait Strategies” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Columbia University, 1997), 175–207. 2
members of New York society. By this time, Sargent had already completed portraits of cultural luminaries such as Claude Monet, Auguste Rodin, writer Robert Louis Stevenson, actress Ellen
Terry, art collector Isabella Stewart Gardner, and many other artists, aristocrats, and socialites.
Most scholars who address Sargent’s portrait of Chase convey only the biographical circumstances surrounding the commission. Considering Sargent in general, critics and advocates alike, both in his time and after his death, often characterized him as a painter of surfaces. Richard Ormond, the artist's great-nephew who compiled the Sargent catalogue raisonné, led the resurgence of interest in Sargent in the 1970s, lauding the artist’s painterly skill, assured bravura style, astute observation, and expressive realism.9 Other scholars, such as Trevor
Fairbrother and Elizabeth Prettejohn, have situated the works in their socio-historical context, focusing on the performance of gender, identity, and class in Sargent’s portraits through the subjects’ costumes, settings, and bodily comportment.10 Indeed, Sargent’s portrayals of his upper-class sitters are commonly understood as clever commentary on the precarity of social status by dramatizing and updating from grand manner portrait conventions.11 While class and gender are heavily addressed in Sargent scholarship, other historical factors that would have impacted his approach to painting, such as the effect of new technologies, have yet to be considered.
9 Richard Ormond, John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors (New York: Harper and Row, 1970); Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 23-43.
10 Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist (Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 2000); Elizabeth Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent (London: Tate Publishing, 1998).
11 Prettejohn, 7.
3
Due to the increasing popularity of photography in the early-twentieth century, the genre of portraiture underwent a major evolution. Since its advent in the early-nineteenth century, photography changed the way artists and audiences viewed paintings. As the technology advanced, the low cost and speed of production allowed people of all classes to have access to portraiture. Cameras provided accurate transcription of observable reality, prompting painters to experiment with more subjective and painterly modes of representation.12 For many portrait painters, who were judged on their ability to produce images that resembled their subjects, adherence to realism was no longer worth pursuing, and they instead prioritized representing their sitters’ inner lives.13 In truth, the media of photography and painting influenced each other, specifically within the realm of portraiture, with painters borrowing compositional techniques from photography and portrait photographers taking direction from painted portrait conventions in staging and posing.14
Photography posed a particular problem for artists like Sargent and Chase who were notorious for their pursuit of objectivity and their focus on observation. Sargent notably declared,
“I paint what I see…I don't dig beneath the surface for things that don't appear before my eyes.”15 For many critics, Sargent and Chase’s style was disconcertingly superficial and lacked
12 Elizabeth Anne McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985), 139, 200.
13 McCauley, 139.
14 Heather McPherson, The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth Century France (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 32, 68–69; Sarah Blackwood, The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019).
15 B. Purvis, “Sargent and His Sitters" [letter to the editor], Sunday Times, February 21, 1926. Sargent also proclaimed, “I do not judge, I only chronicle.” While this may seem to work against an effort to profess his own creativity, I agree with Trevor Fairbrother who interprets this phrase as Sargent’s protection against questions about his interpretations of his sitters. See Trevor Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist, 153. 4
depth, specifically insight into their sitters’ psychology.16 If the sitters simply wished to have a likeness, a photographic portrait could produce the same effect. No portrait painter at the turn of the century could have ignored the financial and philosophical ramifications of the technology’s growing popularity on their livelihoods.
In my study, I assert that Sargent’s portrait of Chase represents the artist as a pedagogue and, even more specifically, his pedagogical philosophy. A celebrated art teacher, Chase had spent decades instructing students in the intellectual and technical skills that went into painting, particularly, as I will discuss, the skill of close observation. Sargent depicts this skill in his portrayal of Chase’s painting process. However, he also seeks to cultivate it among viewers of the actual painting, who would encounter it at the Met. A recurring motif in Chase’s own work is solitary figures observing works of art, which, Gallati argues, frames the subjects as engaged connoisseurs. Likewise, the Met maintained an educational imperative and sought to teach its visitors how to discern quality (if not pursue connoisseurship per se) in order to improve their taste. Staging a depiction of critical observation within an environment that fostered this mode of close looking allowed Sargent to bolster his argument for both the value of painting and his own legacy.
While connoisseurship has often been seen as simply a technical skill that enabled the classification of artwork by artist, school, and period, I consider the intellectual and perceptive work involved in this process. Giovanni Morelli and Bernard Berenson, the widely acknowledged forebearers of the practice of connoisseurship, developed a supposedly
“scientific” method of identifying artistic style and quality. For Morelli and Berenson this
16 R.E.F. [Roger Fry], “The New Gallery,” The Pilot 1 (May 5, 1900): 291. 5
process was based strictly upon the material properties perceived by the eye rather than the examination of secondary historical sources.17 However, as advisors to wealthy art collectors, their evaluations of authenticity and quality were entangled in the art market.18 Although it did not promote thorough connoisseurial classification, the Met emphasized the close looking integral to connoisseurship as a means to evaluate the quality of an object and the craftsmanship that went into it.
In chapter one, I address why Sargent portrayed Chase pausing to observe his painting or his subject and what this gesture reveals about portraiture at the turn of the century. As the portrait was commissioned by Chase’s pupils for the Met, Chase’s role as a teacher and member of the art establishment bears significance. The dramatic lighting, focus on the artist’s gaze, and the moment of suspended action recall Chase’s performative pedagogy, through which he taught his students the importance of close looking, discernment, and composition by performing these actions himself, for them. By positioning Chase as an artist-observer engaged in the intellectual and perceptive work of his painting practice, Sargent affirmed the importance of skilled, artistic observation and refuted critics who characterized both artists’ work as facile and superficial. I attribute these critics’ aspersions to the rising popularity of photography, which prompted the derision of portrait painting as mere reproduction. Sargent’s portrait of Chase attempted to
17 Morelli and Berenson’s methods have been considered problematic by subsequent scholars who question the accuracy of classification based on individuals’ perceptions. Scholars who approach art history through the lens of social history often critique connoisseurship as limited in its ability to provide fruitful analysis about an artist or period. However, other scholars have defended the practice based on its dependence upon skilled analysis and critical inquiry. For more on the observational, intellectual, and analytical aspects of connoisseurship, see Richard Neer, “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style,” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 1–26; David Ebitz, “Connoisseurship as Practice,” Artibus et Historiae 9, no. 18 (1988): 207–12.
18 Catherine Scallen, Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004), 33.
6
emphasize the intellectual aspect of observation and assert the creativity of portrait painting versus photography.
In chapter two, I explore how Sargent orchestrated the reception of the portrait based on its destined location of the Met. The museum’s leadership endeavored to teach close looking along the lines of connoisseurship to the public through their educational programs and display strategies. While there was effort, in some cases, to distinguish objects by location and school, in many cases, the galleries’ organization simply classified works by media, consequently grouping together objects that differed in genre. In viewing by media, visitors were prompted to think about the materials used to create an object. By teaching this practice, the Met leadership intended to cultivate public taste, a project that became dependent on showcasing original works of art. Photography threatened the Met’s goals as well as Sargent’s, as revealed by increasing critical discourse about the medium’s deleterious effects on public taste. The Met’s leaders intended to teach appreciation of fine craftsmanship to consumers, and the automated, reproductive medium did not reveal the singular mark of an artist’s hand. Sargent knew the
Met’s visitors were primed to appreciate individual, handmade craftsmanship. Within this context, he prompted viewers to consider the formal qualities of his own work, thus both picturing and fostering close looking. In orchestrating this claim, he asserted the value of portrait painting in defiance of photography.
Most scholars consider Sargent’s murals in the Boston Public Library (1890-1919) and
Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (1916-1925, when he died) to be the artist’s main efforts to shape and secure a legacy. Soon after this portrait was completed in 1907, Sargent expressed dissatisfaction with society portraiture and took fewer and fewer commissions. However,
7
portraiture was still the genre for which he was most known and in which he held the most professional stake. Sargent’s portrait of Chase, another artist known for painting portraits and who bore the same criticisms for his painting style, presented an opportunity for Sargent to define his legacy in this genre within the preeminent art institution in America. As the rise of photography threatened the value of painted portraiture, Sargent communicated the creativity and skill required in his work through both the subject and form of his painting.
8
CHAPTER 1
THE PAINTER’S GAZE IN AN AUTOMATED AGE
In 1902, the students of William Merritt Chase commissioned John Singer Sargent to paint a portrait (Fig. 1) of their teacher to donate to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. In the resulting full-length portrait, Chase stands grasping the tools of his trade: palette, paintbrushes, and a mahlstick in his left hand and a single paintbrush in his right. His direct gaze pierces the viewer through his pince-nez, its intensity magnified by the artist’s furrowed brow. While
Chase’s accessories indicate that he is in the act of painting, his brush is lowered to his side, resting, yet at the ready. Despite this pause in his handiwork, his focused facial expression implies that his mind remains active. The subject of his gaze, however, is ambiguous; the artist’s dark suit and coat fade into the murky, undefined surroundings, providing no contextual details.
Chase could be observing his canvas or his subject in the space where the viewer is located, either studying his sitter or plotting his next brushstroke.19
According to Chase’s friend, Pennsylvania Academy of the Arts Director Harrison S.
Morris, who accompanied the artist to England for his portrait sitting, Chase arrived at Sargent’s studio fully decked out in his frock coat, top hat, and spats, but was “sheepishly” sent back to his hotel by Sargent to change into his working coat.20 Chase himself told a New York Herald reporter that he left it up to Sargent to decide whether to paint him as a gentleman or as an artist,
19 Critics were mixed as to whether they believed Chase to be looking at his canvas, his sitter, or even his students. Lacey Taylor Jordan, “John Singer Sargent’s Images of Artists in an International Context” (Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 1999), 164–65.
20 Burke, American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 3:257–58. 9
and that Sargent made his choice because he knew Chase better as an artist.21 Scholar Katherine
M. Bourguignon interpreted Sargent’s depiction of Chase as a representation of his dual artist- gentleman persona, as Chase’s flamboyant accessories and sophisticated attire reflect students’ recollections of their teacher’s personality and professional bearing.22 Sargent may have made this decision based on his personal familiarity with Chase, as the latter suggested, or he may have chosen Chase’s “artist persona” because he felt it more appropriate for a commission initiated by the artist’s students. Sargent’s preference was not one shared by most other artists who depicted
Chase. Artists James Carroll Beckwith (Fig. 2) and Eugene Paul Ullman (Fig. 3) portrayed the artist in standard frontal portrait poses bearing the typical gentlemen’s trappings of a cane, coat, and spats. Augustus Saint-Gaudens was an exception who chose to depict Chase in the act of painting. However, in his 1888 sculptural relief (Fig. 4), Saint-Gaudens emphasized the physical action of the artist reaching out to put paintbrush to canvas. Comparatively, Sargent’s decision to position Chase as an artist-observer and to depict the painter in a moment of suspended action is a conspicuous approach to the motif of the artist at work.
In his portrait of Chase, Sargent departed from his usual approach to depicting visual artists. In his portraits of painters and sculptors such as Carolus Duran or Claude Monet, most of the subjects wear proper gentlemen’s attire and betray no indication of their profession. While some of his genre scenes depict visual artists at work, they are primarily plein air renderings in colorful landscapes and interiors. Instead of focusing on the process of artmaking in these genre
21 “Great Artist and His Work: How William M. Chase Who Made a $2,000 Painting in One Day, Won His Fight for Fame,” New York Herald, April 4, 1909, sec. “Art,” 7.
22 Katherine M. Bourguignon, “The Performative Teaching of William Merritt Chase” in Elsa Smithgall et al., William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master (Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection, 2016).
10
scenes, the details of the setting emphasize the artists’ sources of inspiration. In many depictions, the artists are distant enough that their faces are only blurs of color or their heads are turned. In others, like the watercolor sketch In the Generalife (1912) (Fig. 5), the artist, Sargent’s sister
Emily, is at a distance in which her face is close enough to define, yet Sargent renders her physiognomy more vaguely than those of her two companions: the two women observing her work from either side have defined eyes and mouths, but Emily’s facial features are only barely suggested by shadows and pencil outlines. While she is engaged in painting, Sargent depicts only the physical, instead of the creative, act. Further still, Sargent's portrait of Chase is his only depiction of a visual artist at work in which the artist’s face is clearly legible and in which the work could be unambiguously described as a portrait. Within the context of Sargent’s other portrayals, his portrait of Chase is unique in his oeuvre as a depiction of the intellectual creative process. This choice on Sargent’s part provides insight into his interpretation of his painter- colleague and the role of the painter at the turn of the century.
This chapter argues that Sargent’s representation of the intellectual process involved in painting was spurred by the shared criticism the two artists bore. The main criticism levied at both Sargent and Chase was that their work was superficial, leading to accusations that they were all style and no substance. One of the most well-known criticisms directed at Chase was from fellow painter Kenyon Cox. According to Cox, Chase’s work completely lacked creativity; instead, he was like a “human camera” who created “objective, external” art that prized the “eye that sees and the hand that records” but bypassed the mind.23 Art historian and contemporary critic John Van Dyke put it even more bluntly, declaring, “It is perhaps a shortcoming of Chase’s
23 Kenyon Cox, “William M. Chase, Painter,” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 78 (1889): 549.
11
art that he insisted upon merely seeing his subject and not thinking about it.”24 Both accusations implied that the artist was like an automated machine that merely imitated reality. Similarly, critics described Sargent’s technique as an excessively clever, purely sensory-driven approach that lacked imagination or spiritual depth.25
In light of critics’ shared perceptions of them, Chase provided a fitting opportunity for
Sargent to assert the power of surfaces and the skillful seeing necessary for artistic rendering.
Chase’s role as a well-known professional art instructor was a clear opportunity for Sargent to make a statement about the status of painting at the turn of the century. When viewed through the context of Chase’s pedagogy, Sargent’s purposeful choice to focus on the artist’s gaze and to depict him stepping back from his canvas asserts the importance of close observation and judgment in the painting process. The act recalls Chase’s own performative pedagogy in which he taught by example, instructing his students in the importance of careful observation, discernment, and composition.
Chase’s Performative Pedagogy
By the time Sargent painted Chase’s portrait, the latter’s persona as both a gentleman and an artist had become a subject of note. Chase was often featured in magazines and newspapers, in articles that offered first-person accounts of his studio and detailed compilations of his pithy teaching advice. In his role as a gentleman in the art world, he regularly participated in art
24 John C. Van Dyke, American Painting and Its Tradition (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919), 201.
25 These were common criticisms. Some examples include: Christian Brinton, “Sargent Revalued,” Forum 78, no. 4 (October 1927): 635–36; Christian Brinton, “Sargent and His Art,” Munsey’s Magazine 36, no. 3 (December 1906): 265–84; Editor, “America in Europe,” Magazine of Art 6 (1883): 6; Roger Fry, Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art (London: Chatto and Windus, 1926), 125–26. 12
organization committees, juries, and a variety of social events. Readers of art periodicals at the turn of the century would have been familiar with Chase’s persona through news articles and bulletins from these events. He was primarily noted for his studio in the Tenth Street studio building and for his art schools. Chase’s studio became famous among his students, friends, and the larger public for the popular, fashionable society events he hosted and the eye-catching, eclectic décor and souvenirs from his travels that adorned the space. Illustrations and photographs of the interior accompanied the articles, which inventoried his studio accoutrements.26 He also held formal studio receptions and parties, notably even hosting the
Spanish dancer Carmencita for a performance at his studio at Sargent’s request. In his professional capacity Chase appeared as both artist and gentleman, yet for the portrait that would represent Chase at the Met, Sargent chose to emphasize Chase the artist. In this way, he honored his status as a pedagogue and his distinct pedagogy in particular.
At this time, Chase was widely considered to be the most important American teacher for the next generation of artists. Between 1878 and 1911, he taught at the Art Students League in
New York, the Brooklyn Art School, and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts, as well as on summer painting trips and in private classes. He opened his own school, the Chase School of Art
(later known as the New York School of Art), in 1896, and spent twelve years as the primary teacher for the Shinnecock Summer School of Art on Long Island.27
26 For a survey of these first-person accounts, see Nicolai Cikovsky, “William Merritt Chase’s Tenth Street Studio,” Archives of American Art Journal 16, no. 2 (1976): 2–14.
27 The New York School of Art underwent two more name changes after Chase’s departure in 1907 before landing on its current iteration as The Parsons School of Design. Katherine M. Bourguignon, “The Performative Teaching of William Merritt Chase," William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master, 31–32.
13
During their training, both Sargent and Chase learned to think of observation as a critical facet of painting and learned how to commit their observations to canvas in methods as true to their critical visions as possible. At the Royal Academy of Munich, Chase’s instructors emphasized color and technique, specifically via an alla prima approach. With the alla prima technique, Chase learned to paint rapidly with a fully loaded brush, which prioritized tonal relationships and eschewed the use of careful preliminary drawings. This all-at-once approach endeavored to overcome the traditional academic separation between color and drawing.
Wilhelm Leibl was a major pedagogical force at the academy and taught a style inspired by
Édouard Manet and Gustave Courbet. Leibl believed in “rich surfaces” and despised detailed drawing and “prettiness.”28 Likewise, Sargent learned to paint alla prima in the independent atelier of Carolus Duran. Duran instructed his students to paint “au premier coup,” - layering strokes without reworking - “in order to achieve the greatest accuracy of representation with the minimum means,” which made careful observation prior to physical brushwork essential.29
Chase’s pedagogy was grounded in visual discernment and composition, which he taught through his performative teaching demonstrations. In Sargent’s portrait, Chase is presented in a dramatic moment of tension that evokes the theatricality Chase brought to his teaching in critiques, painting demonstrations, and lessons. One keen reviewer from the exhibition of
Sargent’s portrait at M. Knoedler and Company in 1902 picked up on this connection, noting that
“the master has chosen that pose with which [Chase’s students] are most familiar, because it is
28 Bryant, William Merritt Chase, 24–26.
29 Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 23; Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent, 16.
14
one [Chase] takes as he addresses his class and paints something in demonstration of his remarks.”30
Sargent’s use of the dramatic contrast of light and dark, with no discernable background, casts Chase in a spotlight like an actor onstage. Although the artist apparently wore a dark blue jacket at his sittings, the garment appears nearly black in the portrait. Light catches his right hand, raised and crooked at the wrist, suggesting a moment of suspended action. This theatricality reflects Chase’s dramatic flair and performative teaching style. Indeed, his dress was a large part of his performance. Some of Chase’s students associated the decorous and immaculate condition of his clothing, even while painting, with his belief in proper technique.31
Student Gifford Beal explains how Chase’s attire furthered his pedagogy, writing that “[Chase’s] dress was part of his art psychology. As students it made us respect him the more, and, in turn, respect ourselves.”32 In these students’ perceptions, Chase’s physical presentation reflected his pedagogical style of leading by example.
Chase shined as a showman at his student critiques. The ones at Shinnecock Summer
School became social events for the denizens of Southampton. Well-dressed spectators filled the chairs in Chase’s studio every Monday, while his students found seats in whatever remaining space was available. Chase’s critiques were conducted like performances before the assembled group, during which he observed each student’s work on an easel in front of the room and
30 “Art in Public Galleries,” New York Times, November 2, 1902.
31 Ronald Pisano, “The Teaching Career of William Merritt Chase,” American Artist 40, no. 404 (March 1, 1976): 65.
32 Gifford Beal, “William Merritt Chase: The Teacher,” Scribner’s Magazine 61 (1917), as quoted in Ronald G. Pisano, The Students of William Merritt Chase (Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum, 1973).
15
offered advice or entertaining quips, such as telling one unlucky pupil, “Madam, the next time you feel that way, don’t paint!”33 On the occasion that he conducted a painting demonstration before a class, students in the audience waited breathlessly while he worked and frequently burst into applause when the finishing touch was applied.34 Scientist and photographer William Henry
Fox recalled one performance in which Chase painted a fresh fish in his studio on a trip to
Bruges:
For four hours a group of spectators, most of them Mr. Chase’s pupils, watched him working at the subject with concentration of mind and feverish energy. There was little conversation during that period. Once in a while an ejaculation of praise came from one or another of the spectators as a felicitous touch of color or light went into the striking composition emerging from the canvas…The atmosphere was fraught with nervous interest and enthusiasm…It was plain that Mr. Chase heartily enjoyed the work and was inspired by the spectators’ interest.35
Other student accounts recall similar reactions to his painting demonstrations. Chase clearly added gratuitous flourishes for his enraptured audience and relished in the drama. Particular
“felicitous touches” of paint caused students to cheer, like a particularly moving or rousing monologue by an actor. Chase himself compared adroit brushwork to “fine oratory,” indicating that he felt that the visual effects of painting were akin in outcome to a studied verbal performance.36 Fox continued: “As the painter proceeded, intelligible form began to arrange itself from space, the swirls and strokes of the brush drawing in with the pigment the masses and
33 Bryant, William Merritt Chase, 158.
34 Bourguignon, “The Performative Teaching of William Merritt Chase,” William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master, 40.
35 William Henry Fox, “Chase on ‘Still Life,’” The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1915): 200.
36 William Merritt Chase, “In the Art School; Some Students Questions Briefly Answered,” Art Amateur 36 (March 1897): 68.
16
the details of the work with a certitude and firmness of touch only possible in a master.”37 Fox’s description is akin to action enfolding in a play, with emphasis on the details that were attributable to Chase’s mastery. While his audience raptly observed, Chase unveiled his skill with a keen sense of dramatic timing that amazed his onlookers. His performative and theatrical approach kept his audience invested in observing his example and paying acute attention to his technique. Closely observing Chase’s renderings of visual effects taught his students the skills of close looking and visual assessment.
Over an extended period of rapt attention to Chase’s every brushstroke, students observed proper technique through the example of Chase’s own process. As Chase extends his hand to canvas in Sargent’s portrait, the work evokes a similar tension as did Chase’s demonstrations, as audiences looked at the subject and then back to his canvas and wondered, what will he do next?
By watching firsthand, Chase’s audience observed how he studied his subjects, rendered physical attributes using skillful strokes, and even, as Chase fostered through the drama of his performance, achieved an effect of mastery.
Photography and the Threat of Superficiality
This flashy, performative quality in Chase’s teaching and Sargent’s work led to criticisms of superficiality. The repetitiveness of these accusations raises the questions as to why critics were so averse to surface description in painting and why Sargent felt such a strong need to assert the discernment that observation required. Some scholars have attributed this distrust of
“superficiality” to the potential for instability and disingenuousness in social status and persona
37 Fox, “Chase on ‘Still Life,’” 199. 17
during the Gilded Age.38 Others, like scholar Sarah Burns, have connected this aversion to anxiety regarding growing materialist appetites and the threat of bohemian decadence. From this perspective, “The society painter or society artist was a shallow profiteer and an egregious poseur who lived off the cult of luxury and pretense pervasive among the rich” because their
“success depended on the mastery of slick sales techniques, practiced on those who lived only for pleasure and for the assertion of status through commodity display.”39 Further, art threatened democracy because as a luxury item for the rich, it encouraged greed and corruption, leading to spiritual emptiness.40 While this argument is one explanation for why Sargent and Chase’s painting style was so threatening to critics, it fails to take into account other factors in the socio- historical context of their time: namely, that this rise in criticism of excessive surface description coincided with the expanding availability of photography and the increasing sophistication of its technology. In the realm of portraiture, in particular, photography provoked anxieties about a machine representing human subjects.
Many in the turn of the century art world thought that the increasingly popular and accessible medium of photography threatened painting. 41 Influential English art critic John
38 See Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent; Culver, “Performing Identities in the Art of John Singer Sargent" (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1999); Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist; Bruce Redford, John Singer Sargent and the Art of Allusion (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2016); Emily Moore, “John Singer Sargent’s British and American Sitters, 1890-1910: Interpreting Cultural Identity within Society Portraits” (Ph.D. Dissertation, The University of York, 2016).
39 Sarah Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 63.
40 For an in-depth discussion of the threat of materialism, see Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 59–64.
41 See Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989); Nicoletta Leonardi and Simone Natale, eds., Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century (University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2018); Mary Warner Marien, Photography and
18
Ruskin, initially fascinated by the new invention, came to rebuke its verisimilitude and automation.42 As the technology progressed in sophistication from the daguerreotype to the
Kodak camera, photographs were generally believed to be more accurate than paintings because the technology supposedly “imitated” reality.43 This perception of objective accuracy created an identity crisis for painting and other two-dimensional media by implicitly asking what painting could do that photography could not. This question was especially urgent in terms of portraiture; during this time, the purpose of portrait painting was generally considered to be to render a faithful physical likeness, “equated primarily with objective observation and accurate transcription.”44 In addition to its ability to capture a better likeness, the photographic portrait rose in popularity starting in the 1850s because it was more affordable and accessible to the masses.45 The fears that the photograph would render the painted portrait obsolete did not come to pass, but scholars do attribute the downfall of the painted miniature to the rise of photography.46 The art world feared not only photography’s effect on fine art, but the phenomenological ramifications of a machine representing humanity.47 French art critic Charles
Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839-1900 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri; McPherson, The Modern Portrait.
42 Marien, Photography and Its Critics, 58.
43 McPherson, 8; McCauley, A.A.E. Disdéri, 131.
44 McPherson, 15.
45 McPherson, 16.
46 McPherson, 8.
47 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 133–34.
19
Blanc’s rebuke of photography betrayed this concern: “The painter endowed with spirit can evoke the spirit of his sitter, but how can a machine evoke a human soul?”48
Art critics’ denunciations of photography characterized the medium as mere imitation that threatened the cultural power and viability of “true” artistry. However, the nineteenth century defensiveness in public discourse about the artistic value of painting versus photography in fact underscored the vulnerability surrounding this issue.49 Poet and critic Charles Baudelaire famously decried photography by blaming the new technology for deteriorating the public’s aesthetic taste. For critics like him, the industrial medium’s “excessive verisimilitude” prohibited it from becoming art because true art depended on the human capacity for imagination.50 Ruskin too warned against allowing photography to supplant traditional artwork, emphasizing that technological innovation could not exercise the same refining qualities as handcrafted work.51
For painted portraiture, it was especially urgent to assert value through other criteria. A typical reaction, as advocated by painter Jacques-Emile Blanche, was to champion a portrait’s
“subjective and intellectual content…and the importance of analysis and psychological synthesis.”52 These new approaches went beyond likeness and technical adroitness to portray the
48 Charles Blanc, Grammaire Des Arts Du Dessin (Paris, 1867), quoted in Prettejohn, Interpreting Sargent, 22.
49 Marien, Photography and Its Critics, 57; Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 134.
50 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 26; Marien, 86.
51 Marien, 60.
52 McPherson, 148; Jacques-Emile Blanche, Les Arts Plastiques (Paris: Editions de France, 1931).
20
sitter’s inner life and various understandings of psychology and selfhood.53 To their critics,
Sargent and Chase’s failure to search beyond the surface left their work wanting.
The concern over photographic likeness helps explain critics’ disparaging responses to
Chase, Sargent, and their work. To artists and critics like Cox, a painter who was too objective, and who disregarded narrative and psychology, functioned just like a camera, absent of creativity or imagination. Indeed, some critics lambasted realist artists for adhering too closely to nature and therefore producing art “that resembled daguerreotypes.”54 A painter who acted like a
“seeing machine,” as Cox put it, was accepting and assimilating into the unfeeling mechanized world.55 These critiques speak to the anxiety felt by some that the human was becoming like the machine and, further, that the machine was usurping the role of the human.56 In his lament on the state of art, Baudelaire described humans’ creative capacity as central to their differentiation from the external, mechanized modern world, bemoaning that “Each day art further diminishes its self-respect by bowing down before external reality; each day the painter becomes more and more given to painting not what he dreams but what he sees.”57 In reaction to these forces, scholar Heather McPherson contends that “late-nineteenth-century artists tended to emphasize the uniquely human analytic powers of the mind and the tactile and painterly skills of the hand,
53 Blackwood, The Portrait’s Subject, 1–15.
54 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 16.
55 Cox, “William M. Chase, Painter,” 549.
56 For more, see Lawrence W. Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America (Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988), 163–64.
57 Charles Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography,” in Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, ed. Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, trans. J. Mayne (New York: Westview Press, 1982), 21.
21
thus underscoring technical virtuosity.”58 As an example, she references Sargent’s technical use of bravura brushwork, a hallmark of his paintings, including in his depiction of Chase. However, contemporary critics construed his expression of visual effects as superficial rather than reading
Sargent’s style as an act of resistance. Endeavoring to bridge this gap in understanding, Sargent used his commissioned portrait of Chase to assert a portrait painter’s uniquely human ability to observe, reflect on, and revise his work.
Sargent’s portrait illustrates the intellectual labor involved in his and Chase’s painting process, demonstrating that they were unlike automated cameras that simply reproduced their subjects. Instead, Sargent and Chase used skills that artist Joseph Pennell marshalled against photography: Pennell argued that while anyone could take a photograph, “painters can, with time and with patience and great struggles, produce something that is truer to the facts before them than the machine, though these facts may not be so elaborately recorded."59 Pennell referred to reproducing the visual effects of materials, which the painter could better apprehend through skillful observation than the camera. More than just employing descriptive detail, the painter could detect and represent the truth of an optical impression. Pennell’s appeal for “facts” referred to contingent optical effects rendered through bravura description. In their artmaking, Sargent and Chase observed such visual effects, assessed their value for pictorial representation, and then rendered the details they chose by applying the skills they had developed over time. By depicting
Chase engaging in the intellectual and perceptive work that punctuates the physical handling of paint, Sargent refuted the accusations that their portraits were facile and superficial. Further, the
58 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 109.
59 Joseph Pennell, “Is Photography Among the Fine Arts?,” The Contemporary Review 72 (July 1, 1897): 834–35. 22
fact that the subject of Chase’s gaze is ambiguous disavows the claim that Sargent lacked imagination and intellectual complexity. Sargent charges the viewer to determine Chase’s subject and their own relation to it. With this gesture, Sargent staked a claim to the value of the painter in an increasingly automated age.
23
CHAPTER 2
FRAMING CLOSE LOOKING AT THE METROPOLITAN
MUSEUM OF ART
When Chase’s students raised enough funds from exhibiting his portrait to reach
Sargent’s fee, they gifted the painting to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Sargent agreed to a price substantially lower than his usual fee, which suggests that he was sympathetic to Chase’s students and/or his subject or desired the opportunity for another of his works to be acquired by the Met; perhaps he appreciated both prospects.60 As the Met was one of the preeminent art museums in America at the time, Sargent, Chase, and Chase’s devoted students would likely consider this commission as an opportunity to comment upon and shape the their artistic legacies. Yet the museum did more than serve as an arbiter of masterful and important art. As an institution, the museum asserted values particular to the goals of its wealthy leadership, but these goals happened to align with Sargent’s own aspirations for his work and for portrait painting in general. Since the museum’s founding in 1870, Met trustees declared their intent to instruct the public in art history and improve its tastes by showcasing (what they believed to be) the finest examples of art. To this end, the Met implemented display strategies that promoted connoisseurial assessment of quality and developed educational programs—all aimed to train consumers to identify and recognize fine craftsmanship.
The same skills that the Met’s visitors were encouraged to exercise were portrayed in
Sargent’s portrait. In the portrait, Chase demonstrates the skill of visual discernment involved in
60 Sargent’s first portrait to be accessioned by the Met was a portrait of Henry G. Marquand, president of the Met’s board of trustees, which had been commissioned by the other trustees in 1897. The portrait of Chase was his second to be acquired by the museum. 24
the process of painting, but, in the context of the Met, he also models for viewers how to look at and think about art. Chase himself often brought his students to museums to observe paintings by well-known historical artists and regularly lectured on the paintings on view. He even brought his students to see his portrait once it was installed, and it became a focal point for at least one of his museum lectures.61 Presumably, in these visits Chase intended for his students to examine the artists’ examples and apply what they learned to their own practice. The Met, on the other hand, wished to produce connoisseurs-cum-consumers who sought out high-quality goods like those its trustees had a hand in producing. Through the museum’s display strategies and educational programs, viewers were primed to practice close looking to evaluate a painting’s material and formal properties. In this context, given the Met’s pedagogical imperatives and Sargent’s portrayal of Chase, viewers would be prompted to consider his portrait’s own craftmanship.
Exploiting this context, Sargent further asserted the value of his own painting and portrait painting in general over photography. In portraying Chase in the act of painting and teaching,
Sargent demonstrated how a painted portrait could express and reveal more than a photograph could about its subject’s profession and character. But in encouraging viewers to look at his work in this way, he demonstrated that comparable visual and technical skills went into his own work and into portrait painting in general. As the Met advocated for fine craftmanship in an increasingly industrialized nation, Sargent defended his art practice and legacy.
61 Bryant, William Merritt Chase, 184. 25
The Skill of Seeing
Sargent’s purposeful focus on Chase’s gaze emphasizes the artist’s vision and his skill of visual discernment. The bright illumination on Chase’s face and starched white collar call attention to his concentrated expression. The black ribbon on his pince-nez draws the viewer’s eye to his furrowed brow, landing on his intense stare. With Chase’s intent gaze as the focal point of the composition, the subject of the portrait becomes the act of looking itself. Pictured in the act of observing his painting or his sitter, Chase demonstrates the relationship between observation and assessment. His approach to the artistic process was not strictly technical, but also involved careful, cultivated decision-making in terms of composition and draughtsmanship.
By demonstrating the painter’s skill of seeing through Chase, Sargent asserts their uniquely human capabilities of thought and interpretation against the rise of photography. While the importance of Chase’s vision is the focal point of Sargent’s portrait of him, the subject of the portrait he may be observing is undetermined. We, as viewers, are in the space where Chase works, left to imagine what he is looking at so carefully. Looking back at Chase, the viewer can imagine themselves as the subject of his portrait. Alternatively, the plane of Sargent’s canvas could stand in for the implied canvas upon which Chase is working. The process of trying to decipher this ambiguity reinforces the connection between looking and thinking that the work attempts to assert.
The portrait’s engagement with acts of observation reflects Chase’s demonstrated interest in the intellectual work that he believed the visual arts demanded from both artists and viewers.
Other scholars have noticed that “looking” is a key theme in Chase’s work. In her monograph on
Chase, Gallati interprets Chase’s series of paintings of his Tenth Street studio as tributes to the
26
pleasure of looking at art objects.62 However, rather than a sensuous and mindless pleasure,
Gallati contends that these works model connoisseurship by picturing solitary female subjects in the act of observation. As these women “hone their skills in connoisseurship,” looking at art becomes “an intellectual activity.”63 While the production of paintings of people looking at art was not new, Chase’s figures’ engagement in “the active and solitary experience of studying the art object” sets his paintings apart.64 In The Inner Studio, Tenth Street (1882) (Fig. 6), a female figure sits on a cushioned bench with her back to the viewer in front of a relatively large, gold- framed painting. The surface of this painting-within-a-painting is vaguely rendered, and the figure’s placement blocks our view. Her obstruction foregrounds her act; by looking at the painting, she is engaging in visual study of the work that we, as viewers, cannot access. Gallati observes that the composition of Chase’s painting leads us to believe that the painting-within-a- painting is the subject of the work, yet he confounds our efforts to see it. Rather than the gold- framed painting, the act of looking itself is the subject of the work, prompting the viewer to consider their own engagement with the work itself. Counter to Cox’s appraisal of Chase as a
“human camera,” Gallati indicates that these paintings were not created with a purely imitative objective. Chase’s artistic approach required intellectual skill just as his subjects’ observation of art objects did. His alla prima process required rendering his paintings through immediate observation and decision-making.
62 Gallati, William Merritt Chase, 51.
63 Gallati, 48–49.
64 Gallati, 48–49. 27
The physiological understanding of sight had recently undergone a reevaluation in the nineteenth century. Pioneered by Hermann von Helmholtz, a German scientist and philosopher, new theories on perception explained the way the brain interprets visual information received by the eyes. The idea that sensations and color are not innate to the objects they describe but rather are created by the mind revolutionized the way artists and critics discussed art. Helmholtz believed that this information should change painters’ tactics, declaring that “subjective phenomena of the eye must be objectively introduced into the picture” in order for the painter to recreate their optical experience for a viewer.65 These new understandings of vision particularly influenced Impressionist artists and their critics. Poet and critic Emile Blémont described the
Impressionist approach, asserting that the artists “do not imitate; they translate, they interpret.
They set out to extract the result of the multiple lines and colors that the eye perceives at a glance before an aspect of nature.”66 For Blémont, the contingent nature of vision is reflected in
Impressionist technique. Burns illustrates this shift in cultural understanding by quoting psychologist Frank Spindler, who went so far as to claim that the mind is the “true artist,” creating its own subjective picture of the world.67 Now, understanding vision’s mental and optical operations, cotemporary artists “could produce a truer and more artistic vision” than earlier artists who rendered detail with a precision untrue to actual optical processes.68 Burns
65 Hermann von Helmholtz, “On the Relation of Optics to Painting,” in Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 24 (1878; New York: J. Fitzgerald, 1882), 616.
66 Emile Blémont, “The Impressionists, 1876,” in Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, ed. and trans. J.C. Taylor (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989), 437.
67 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 130.
68 Burns, 133.
28
singles out Chase as an exemplar of “the figure of the artist as seeing expert” because with his intuitive approach “he could translate visual sensations into pictorial equivalents with dazzling skill and unerring taste.”69
The guidance Chase offered to his pupils revealed that he considered close looking, and the learning it engendered, as foundational to artmaking. In recalling Chase’s approach, students remarked upon his emphasis on immediate observation. He encouraged students to maintain a fresh, receptive state of mind, taking in their subjects in glances to apprehend spontaneous impressions.70 Often, his advice related to finding inspiration through direct observation of nature due to his belief that the mind learns even when not painting. This is evidenced in directives such as, “Go out into the fields, and see and think. Mental work is necessary, and what is thought and felt at quiet moments is what brings success.”71 Chase found photographic techniques to be useful for assessing composition, suggesting that students use a card with a square hole as a tool to view their surroundings. This “viewfinder” enabled students to discover unusual perspectives and formulate interesting snapshot compositions.72 The exercise would ostensibly encourage compositional experimentation and unexpected framing that would permit one to “see [the subject] in some way in which it would never occur to [them] to approach it.”73
After they learned what they could at school, Chase encouraged them to go off and “develop
69 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 126–27.
70 Frances Lauderbach, “Notes From Talks,” 434.
71 Chase, “In the Art School; Some Students Questions Briefly Answered,” 68.
72 Bryant, William Merritt Chase, 157.
73 Pisano, “The Teaching Career of William Merritt Chase,” 64.
29
whatever originality they may possess-to make each one see for himself and paint as he has seen.”74 In the course of their schooling, Chase intended for students to cultivate their own vision and translate it into an individual style.
In his time, critics and artists described Sargent’s own seeing as a keen tool for searching for truth, thus underscoring the skill required in his work and pictured in his portrait of Chase.
Sargent’s analytical, “impersonal, penetrating, and masterful gaze” was associated with modernity, progress, and science. One critic claimed that the sharpness of his eye saw through
“human vanity” and brought to light hidden aspects of his sitters’ personalities or states of affairs that they might prefer to keep private.75 Another reviewer also noted Sargent’s ability to reveal his sitters’ “mentalities” and “attitudes,” but through an objective gaze, which, like Cox’s description of Chase, he compared to that of a camera.76 Chase referred to Sargent’s seeing in a way that seemed to suggest automation, but which actually spoke to the artist’s cultivated skill.
For Chase, the “great” artist’s process of observation was so immediate and direct that “there is no intermission between the head and the hand. He sees so well and so instantly that intuitively he reaches for the right color, and is unconscious of using it, any more than using one’s teeth or ears.” While Sargent’s skill in observation became intuitive, Chase pointed out that it developed from “constant work” on Sargent’s part. Sargent’s and Chase’s methods of seeing were often discussed by critics, fellow artists, and themselves, and these comments would frame how viewers—especially those versed in the art press—would see and understand his portrait of
74 See Pisano, “Teaching Career,” 64; Lauderbach, “Notes From Talks,” 434.
75 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 177–80.
76 John Cournos, “John S. Sargent,” Forum, August 1915.
30
Chase. In fact, given Sargent’s own investment in close looking, his acceptance of this commission may have been predicated upon the Met’s pedagogical imperatives and, in particular, its attention to and emphasis of close looking.
The Met and the Value of Close Looking
The knowledge that his portrait was intended for the Met enabled Sargent to mobilize the museum’s interest in close looking for his own purposes. From its founding, the Met’s trustees stated that the institution’s goals were to provide instruction in art history and to train its visitors to appreciate “quality” through the skills we today associate with connoisseurship in the service of improving public taste.77 By developing their taste and visual discernment, visitors could use these skills as consumers and ultimately better serve American industry and cultural capital.78 In this respect, the trustees’ motivations in educating the public certainly went deeper than pure philanthropy. Donating works of art and displaying them within the Met also allowed patrons to show off their riches while boasting civic-mindedness.79 It was in the Met leadership’s own interest to educate their visitors in art history and the principles of connoisseurship; by cultivating a public appreciation of the objects on display, elite patrons increased their own status.
77 Quoted in Winifred E. Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1913), 198–99.
78 Jeffrey Trask, Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in America (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012), 88.
79 Alan Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States (Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998), 25.
31
The threat of photography that loomed over Sargent also complicated the goals of the
Met. The museum’s leadership desired to improve public taste, and some, like Baudelaire, claimed that photography undermined the appreciation of art. Baudelaire directly blamed the new technology and scathingly attacked the popular taste of the masses who were fascinated by it. In his denunciation, he asserted that the public, increasingly used to this “material science” being presented as a beautiful object, would, in time, “have singularly diminished its faculties of judging and feeling what are among the most ethereal and immaterial aspects of creation.”80
Blanche was similarly concerned, specifically fearing the potential for photography to devalue portraiture.81 Sargent employed the museum setting, which shared his investment in close looking and the threat from photography, to orchestrate the interpretation of his portrait and emphasize the painting’s material properties and the skills used to achieve them.
Speaking at the opening ceremonies for the museum’s Central Park building, trustee
Joseph H. Choate’s addressed the crowd on “The History and Future Plans of the Museum,” and announced his ambition for American industry to keep up with the world, which implicated art as a vital tool of public edification. About the museum’s aims, he declared:
“[The museum’s founders] believed that the diffusion of a knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate, and refine a practical and laborious people; that though the great masterpieces of painting and sculpture which have commanded the reverence and admiration of mankind, and satisfied the yearnings of the human mind for perfection in form and color, which have served for the delight and the refinement of educated men and women in all countries, and inspired and kept alive the genius of successive ages, could never be within their reach, yet it might be possible in the progress of time to gather a collection of works of merit, which should impart some knowledge of art and its history to a people who were yet to take almost their first lesson in that department of knowledge. Their plan was not to establish a mere cabinet of
80 Baudelaire, “The Salon of 1859” 21.
81 McPherson, The Modern Portrait, 148, referencing Blanche, Les Arts Plastiques, 202.
32
curiosities which should serve to kill time for the idle, but gradually to gather together a more or less complete collection of objects illustrative of the history of art in all its branches, from the earliest beginnings to the present time, which should serve not only for the instruction and entertainment of the people, but should also show to the students and artisans of every branch of industry, in the high and acknowledged standards of form and of color, what the past had accomplished for them to imitate and excel."82
Choate asserted that the Met would educate and civilize its visitors through the observation of high-quality design. Specifically, he referenced that art “masterpieces” held moral value and could refine the taste of the greater public.
Educating the public in recognizing and assessing the principles of good design was intended to train consumers. In 1906, the new Met director Caspar Purdon Clarke addressed the possibility of the museum improving consumer taste, claiming that, “the general public, simply by seeing and admiring [the objects on display], will acquire a standard of comparison with which to measure articles of similar sort which are set forth for sale in the shops.”83 Under the supervision of industrial financier and philanthropist Robert de Forest, who was appointed a trustee in 1889 and served as president of the Met from 1913 – 1931, the Met’s educational goals re-centered around “improving consumer taste and the quality of manufactures available to consumers.”84 More specifically:
[I]ndustrial arts—everyday household things—were seen as having educational value to teach taste and improve the quality of goods available to American consumers… Industrial arts also served the goals of democratizing museums by breaking down distinctions between high culture and industrial production, and by expanding opportunities to teach and learn appreciation of beauty and principles of design—the
82 Quoted in Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 198–99.
83 “The Art Museum as an Historian: Vital Work to Be Done in the Metropolitan Under the Reorganization Effected by Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke,” Craftsman 11 (November 1906): 165.
84 Trask, Things American, 55.
33
cultivation of taste—which traditional notions of connoisseurship had previously restricted by social privilege.85
Museum curators selected objects they believed to be examples of good taste, which would then be instructive to designers, craftsmen, and their consumers.86 In its early days, the Met planned to instruct artisans by constructing displays that illustrated manufactural development, and from
1880-1894 the museum managed an industrial design school.87 Museums also used plaster casts of ancient and Renaissance sculpture and architecture for educational purposes at the end of the nineteenth century.88 Education efforts at the turn of the century included connecting with industrial groups and collecting decorative arts.89 By teaching artisans how to make quality industrial products, the museum leadership hoped to improve American cultural development and trade prospects, buffeting the country’s international cultural status.
In 1905, the year Sargent’s portrait was accessioned, the Met shifted its efforts to improving taste and consumer discretion by collecting and displaying one-of-a-kind, irreproducible works of art. The Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, first made the shift from collecting copies to originals. After moving plaster casts to the basement in 1906, their educational aims placed more emphasis on masterpieces and “the importance of contemplating
85 Trask, 35–36.
86 Trask, Things American, 82.; Guglielmo, Antoniette M. “Workbench of American Taste: Richard F. Bach, Industrial Art, and Consumerism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1917–1940” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2008), 69.
87 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 201–2.
88 See “The American Cast Museum: An Episode in the History of the Institutional Definition of Art” in Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction, 38–56.
89 Trask, Things American, 50, 70.
34
the beauty of an object and cultivating a heightened awareness of its aesthetics.”90 This entailed training the eye to appreciate formal qualities, a skill that Chase cultivated in his students and which Sargent illustrated through Chase in his portrait. The skill of close looking, informed by a connoisseurial understanding of material and quality, was intended to prepare museum visitors to examine the Met’s examples of fine craftsmanship. While the Met did not start removing its cast displays until the following decade, changes in its administration in 1905 led to a new collecting policy with, in the words of the president and trustees, more rigorous standards and a preference toward “masterpieces.”91 Winifred E. Howe, the first person to write a history of the Met, also noted the effects of the museum’s new, financially empowered position. After building up a large endowment, the institution could be more judicious about the gifts and objects it accepted, purchased, and displayed.92 Other scholars have mentioned this shift, noting that this revision in the museum’s collecting policy prioritized original works over plaster casts and industrial art in the search for “quality.”93 Increasingly, original “fine art” objects were thought to more effectively train consumers in good design. Scholar Alan Wallach attributes the rejection of copies and sculpture casts to the rise of the art market as Gilded Age magnates began collecting art and the distinction between original and fake became essential. These elite collectors were advised by art dealers and experts who used connoisseurial skills to evaluate “artistic originality
90 Guglielmo, “Workbench of American Taste," 128.
91 J. Pierpont Morgan and Robert W. DeForest, “Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees” (The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1905), 11; Guglielmo, “Workbench of American Taste,” 67.
92 Howe, A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 295. Other scholars note that this date marked a shift in the Met’s curatorial emphasis to collecting originals because it had acquired a completeness in their fine art collections which secured their international reputation. See Trask, Things American, 121.
93 Guglielmo, “Workbench of American Taste” 70; Trask, Things American, 121.
35
and historical authenticity,” which became the most important aspects in evaluating a work of art.94
The practice of collecting original works, like Sargent’s portrait, was implicitly
95 threatened by the reproductive medium of photography. As Sargent would have been aware, the rise of photography threatened the aims of the Met to refine public taste, educate consumers, and display originals. Around this time, Met trustees and some critics proposed that there was a decline in public taste due to machine-made design.96 As an automated practice, photography was widely considered to be a technical rather than artistic medium, thereby precluding it from exemplifying fine craftsmanship and skilled artmaking. As articulated by scholar Susan Buck-
Morss in her book expounding on the ideas of Walter Benjamin, “The invention of photography, with its exact rendering of nature, enabled technology to overtake artists at their own task, and undermined the uniqueness, the one-time-only “aura” of the masterpiece by allowing for the mass reproduction of images.”97 For those invested in art’s “sacralization,” photography’s reproducibility and accessibility to makers of all skill levels undermined the value they placed in traditional forms of art.98
94 Wallach, Exhibiting Contradiction, 50.
95 The Met remained skeptical to photography and did not begin collecting it until 1928 when Alfred Stieglitz donated a significant gift of photographs. By Stieglitz’s own account, the museum’s leadership was reticent to consider photography as art. “Photographs: History of Photographs at the Met,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed March 23, 2021, https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial-departments/photographs; John J. McKendry, “Photographs in the Metropolitan,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 7 (March 1969).
96 Guglielmo, "Workbench of American Taste," 65; Trask, Things American, 94.
97 Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing, 131.
98 Levine, Highbrow / Lowbrow, 160.
36
To this end, Sargent’s emphasis on looking in his portrait of Chase was as much a way to honor his subject’s pedagogy as it was a way to exploit the museum’s promotion of a connoisseurial appreciation of fine craftsmanship for his own purposes. Sargent’s portrait exhibits the very surface details that Chase trained his students to capture. Through the creative process of close looking, Chase taught his students to assess and render these effects, not through photographic imitation, but technical mastery. The artists’ shared interest in observation, as manifested in Chase’s painting instruction, echoed the Met’s objective to educate their visitors in how to look at art. The museum used their display strategies and educational programs to provide their viewers the tools to the appreciate the one-of-a-kind objects on view as paragons of fine art and skilled craftsmanship. Leaning on the Met’s investment in original works of art, Sargent staked a claim for the value of the painter’s uniquely human skill of visual assessment at the beginning of the twentieth century.
Articulating a Legacy as a Portrait Painter
At the time his portrait of Chase was installed at the Met, Sargent was already involved in grander, more public statements to bolster his legacy.99 In 1890 he embarked on a commission to create murals for the Boston Public Library, a project that would consume him until his death in 1925. For the library he took on the subject of the history of Christianity, invoking stories and
99 While Sargent had other paintings that made their way into the Met, the commission of Chase was a chance to craft a portrait specifically directed towards the Met audience that spoke directly to the artistic process. Most other portraits that were likely to be acquired by the museum were works that Sargent had previously completed that the owners donated. While the portrait of trustee Marquand was also a commission with a predetermined destination for the Met, Marquand’s personage did not afford the opportunity as Chase’s to comment upon the artistic process. As a portrait honoring a professional gentleman, commissioned by a group of other influential professional men, the work adhered more closely to traditional portrait conventions. I offer that Sargent would have felt more creative freedom, and more personal agency, with a portrait of a fellow working artist.
37
symbolism from the Old and New Testaments. Sargent took on additional mural commissions for the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston in 1916, which included allegorical themes from classical mythology and the glorification of the arts, and a smaller-scale project memorializing World War
I in Harvard University’s Widener Library in 1921. The Boston murals were ambitious in scope and iconography, leading scholars to consider them Sargent’s primary attempts to define his legacy.100 Yet these murals are vastly different from the work for which Sargent was most known, causing Burns to call them “an elaborate attempt to invent another Sargent—a deep, intellectual, transcendent, philosophical one.”101
Despite these projects, Sargent’s painting of Chase reflects the artist’s attempt to establish his legacy in an art museum within the genre that defined his career. There is precedent for Sargent using portraits of other artists to make a statement about his own work and career.
Scholar Denis Denisoff argues that, especially in his early career, Sargent purposefully chose to paint many portraits of his artist friends and acquaintances in order to strategically map out his career by associating himself with the reputations of established, successful artists.102 While
Sargent was firmly established by the turn of the century, associating himself with Chase in a work destined for the Met allowed him to comment on the significance of their shared approach to painting, especially in the genre of portraiture.
The Met was actively collecting significant numbers of portraits, usually of important personages in business, politics, and art. In the couple decades prior to the accession of Sargent’s
100 See Mary Crawford-Volk, “Sargent in Public: On the Boston Murals” in Ormond and Kilmurray, John Singer Sargent, 46; Fairbrother, John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist, 38, 40.
101 Burns, Inventing the Modern Artist, 63.
102 Dennis Denisoff, “Intimacy, Authority, Anxiety: John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of Artists,” Nineteenth Century Studies 25 (2011): 251–60. 38
portrait, the museum had acquired portraits of important American historical figures such as
Christopher Columbus and Benjamin Franklin and American artists like Benjamin West and
Thomas Sully.103 Given this history, we can imagine Sargent would have liked his work, if not his image, included in this illustrious lineage. Thus, via his painting of Chase, Sargent located both of them and, further, their shared emphasis on perceptual acuity and technical skill, in the art-historical canon.
103 George H. Story, “Illustrated Catalogue: Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,” 1905, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 43, 138, 166; “Benjamin West,” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, accessed October 8, 2020, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/14513. 39
CONCLUSION
In his portrait of Chase, Sargent pictured and enacted the intellectual and observational work that went into portrait painting, thereby staking a claim for the genre’s importance against the rising threat of automation in the form of photography. The advent of the industrial medium threatened the very definition of art and its purpose in society. Sargent and Chase’s paintings became sites of scrutiny for their perceived superficiality, earning comparisons to photography that evidenced anxieties about the increasingly mechanized modern world.
Knowing that the Met shared his concern for art that reflected the human hand and observation, Sargent exploited the institution and its promotion of the connoisseurial skill of evaluating craftsmanship to prime viewers to understand and acknowledge the visual, technical, and intellectual expertise required to produce his portrait. For the Met’s leadership at the turn of the century, the display of art was an opportunity to cultivate consumer taste. They believed exposing visitors to original works of art and singular masterpieces would enable their visitors to discern “quality,” as they defined it. Sargent’s depiction of Chase demonstrating close looking modeled for the museum’s visitors how to observe and assess the painting itself. For Sargent, encouraging viewers to look closely at his work revealed the creative collaboration of the human mind, eye, and hand, and disavowed the critics who called his paintings superficial.
With these complex interests in play, art operated as a locus for anxieties about the modern world and art’s place within it. Within the context of the Met, a pedagogical institution and arbiter of culture, Sargent’s portrait of Chase reveals the enduring importance of careful observation, assessment, and contemplation of painting.
40
ILLUSTRATIONS
Due to copyright restrictions, the illustrations for this thesis are only available in the hard copy version that is on file in the Visual Resources Center in the Katzen Arts Center at American
University.
Figure 1: John Singer Sargent, William M. Chase, N.A., 1902. Oil on canvas
Figure 2: James Carroll Beckwith, Portrait of William Merritt Chase, 1881-1882. Oil on canvas
Figure 3: Eugene Paul Ullman, Portrait of William Merritt Chase in his Studio, 1903. Oil on canvas
Figure 4: Augustus Saint-Gaudens, Portrait of William Merritt Chase, 1888. Bronze relief
Figure 5: John Singer Sargent, In the Generalife, 1912. Watercolor, wax crayon, and graphite on white wove paper
Figure 6: William Merritt Chase, The Inner Studio, Tenth Street, 1882. Oil on canvas
41
BIBLIOGRAPHY
“Art in Public Galleries.” New York Times, November 2, 1902. Baudelaire, Charles. “The Salon of 1859: The Modern Public and Photography.” In Modern Art and Modernism: A Critical Anthology, edited by Francis Frascina and Charles Harrison, translated by J. Mayne, 19–21. New York: Westview Press, 1982. Beal, Gifford. “William Merritt Chase: The Teacher.” Scribner’s Magazine 61 (1917). The Metropolitan Museum of Art. “Benjamin West.” Accessed October 8, 2020. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/14513. Blackwood, Sarah. The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019. https://www-jstor- org.proxyau.wrlc.org/stable/10.5149/9781469652610_blackwood. Blanc, Charles. Grammaire Des Arts Du Dessin. Paris, 1867. Blanche, Jacques-Emile. Les Arts Plastiques. Paris: Editions de France, 1931. Blémont, Emile. “The Impressionists, 1876.” In Nineteenth-Century Theories of Art, edited and translated by J.C. Taylor. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Brinton, Christian. “Sargent and His Art.” Munsey’s Magazine 36, no. 3 (December 1906): 265– 84. ———. “Sargent Revalued.” Forum 78, no. 4 (October 1927): 635–36. Bryant, Keith L. William Merritt Chase, a Genteel Bohemian. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1991. Buck-Morss, Susan. The Dialectics of Seeing: Walter Benjamin and the Arcades Project. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. Burke, Doreen Bolger. American Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art. Vol. 3. New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980. Burns, Sarah. Inventing the Modern Artist: Art and Culture in Gilded Age America. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996. Caffin, Charles H. “John Singer Sargent, The Greatest Contemporary Portrait Painter.” World’s Work 7 (November 1903): 4099–4118. Chase, William Merritt. “In the Art School; Some Students Questions Briefly Answered.” Art Amateur 36 (March 1897): 68. Cikovsky, Nicolai. “William Merritt Chase’s Tenth Street Studio.” Archives of American Art Journal 16, no. 2 (1976): 2–14. Cournos, John. “John S. Sargent.” Forum, August 1915. Cox, Kenyon. “William M. Chase, Painter.” Harper’s New Monthly Magazine 78 (1889): 549– 57. Denisoff, Dennis. “Intimacy, Authority, Anxiety: John Singer Sargent’s Portraits of Artists.” Nineteenth Century Studies 25 (2011): 251–60. Ebitz, David. “Connoisseurship as Practice.” Artibus et Historiae 9, no. 18 (1988): 207–12. Editor. “America in Europe.” Magazine of Art 6 (1883): 6. Fairbrother, Trevor. John Singer Sargent: The Sensualist. Seattle, WA: Seattle Art Museum, 2000. Fox, William Henry. “Chase on ‘Still Life.’” The Brooklyn Museum Quarterly 1, no. 4 (1915): 196–200. Fry, Roger. Transformations: Critical and Speculative Essays on Art. London: Chatto and Windus, 1926.
42
Gallati, Barbara Dayer. William Merritt Chase. New York: Harry N. Abrams in association with the National Museum of American Art, Smithsonian Institution, 1995. “Girls Get Sargent to Paint Chase: Portrait That Will Attract Much Attention When It Is First Exhibited Next Month.” New York Times, October 19, 1902. “Great Artist and His Work: How William M. Chase Who Made a $2,000 Painting in One Day, Won His Fight for Fame.” New York Herald, April 4, 1909, sec. “Art.” Guglielmo, Antoniette M. “Workbench of American Taste: Richard F. Bach, Industrial Art, and Consumerism at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1917–1940.” Ph.D. Dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2008. Helmholtz, Hermann von. “On the Relation of Optics to Painting.” In Humboldt Library of Popular Science Literature 24. 1878; New York: J. Fitzgerald, 1882. Howe, Winifred E. A History of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. New York: Arno Press, 1974. https://hdl.handle.net/2027/pst.000021183553. Jordan, Lacey Taylor. “John Singer Sargent’s Images of Artists in an International Context.” Ph.D. Dissertation, Emory University, 1999. Lauderbach, Frances. “Notes From Talks by William M. Chase: Summer Class, Carmel-By-the- Sea, California: Memoranda from a Student’s Note Book.” The American Magazine of Art 8, no. 11 (1917): 432–38. https://www-jstor-org.proxyau.wrlc.org/stable/23934092. Leonardi, Nicoletta, and Simone Natale, eds. Photography and Other Media in the Nineteenth Century. University Park, PA: The Pennsylvania University Press, 2018. Levine, Lawrence W. Highbrow / Lowbrow: The Emergence of Cultural Hierarchy in America. Cambridge, MA; London, England: Harvard University Press, 1988. Marien, Mary Warner. Photography and Its Critics: A Cultural History, 1839-1900. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. McCauley, Elizabeth Anne. A.A.E. Disdéri and the Carte de Visite Portrait Photograph. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1985. McKendry, John J. “Photographs in the Metropolitan.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 27, no. 7 (March 1969). McPherson, Heather. The Modern Portrait in Nineteenth Century France. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Morgan, J. Pierpont, and Robert W. DeForest. “Thirty-Fifth Annual Report of the Trustees.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1905. https://www.jstor.org/stable/40303205. “Mr. Sargent’s Portrait of Chase.” Century Illustrated Magazine, May 1903. Neer, Richard. “Connoisseurship and the Stakes of Style.” Critical Inquiry 32, no. 1 (Autumn 2005): 1–26. Ormond, Richard. John Singer Sargent: Paintings, Drawings, Watercolors. New York: Harper and Row, 1970. Ormond, Richard, and Elaine Kilmurray. John Singer Sargent. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1998. Pennell, Joseph. “Is Photography Among the Fine Arts?” The Contemporary Review 72 (July 1, 1897): 824–36. “Photographs: History of Photographs at the Met.” The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Accessed March 23, 2021. https://www.metmuseum.org/about-the-met/curatorial- departments/photographs. Pisano, Ronald. “The Teaching Career of William Merritt Chase.” American Artist 40, no. 404 (March 1, 1976). http://search.proquest.com/docview/1296101715/.
43
Pisano, Ronald G. The Students of William Merritt Chase. Huntington, NY: Heckscher Museum, 1973. Prettejohn, Elizabeth. Interpreting Sargent. London: Tate Publishing, 1998. Purvis, B. “Sargent and His Sitters [Letter to the Editor].” Sunday Times. February 21, 1926. R.E.F. [Roger Fry]. “The New Gallery.” The Pilot 1 (May 5, 1900). Scallen, Catherine. Rembrandt, Reputation, and the Practice of Connoisseurship. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2004. Smithgall, Elsa, Erica E. Hirshler, Katherine M. Bourguignon, Giovanna Ginex, and John Davis. William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master. Washington, D.C.: The Phillips Collection, 2016. Story, George H. “Illustrated Catalogue: Paintings in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York,” 1905. The Metropolitan Museum of Art. https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/30172/rec/6. “The Art Museum as an Historian: Vital Work to Be Done in the Metropolitan Under the Reorganization Effected by Sir Caspar Purdon Clarke.” Craftsman 11 (November 1906). Trask, Jeffrey. Things American: Art Museums and Civic Culture in America. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Van Dyke, John C. American Painting and Its Tradition. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1919. Wallach, Alan. Exhibiting Contradiction: Essays on the Art Museum in the United States. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press, 1998.
44