William Merritt Chase

The great American artist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916) completed a wide variety of portraits over his long career. Among his subjects were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, New York luminaries, and members of his family as well as a number of self-portraits. Chase's ability to capture a likeness was renowned, yet it was his dashing and bravura brushwork that truly set his portraits apart. This highly anticipated book presents for the first time the entire collection of Chase's known portraits in oil. Each is gorgeously reproduced, and many are published in colour for the first time. This is the second of four volumes cataloguing the complete works of William Merritt Chase. The catalogue raisonne project has presented immense challenges, for Chase kept no records at all, and staggering numbers of forgeries of his work appeared soon after he died. Finding many of his portraits was especially difficult, as no log book of sitters has been located and no other records exist for those works that were not publicly exhibited. Nevertheless, Ronald Pisano's meticulous research has uncovered more than six hundred portraits in private and public collections. Among the most notable are Chase's penetrating portrait of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), a commanding portrait of Dora Wheeler (Cleveland Museum of Art), "The Feather Fan" featuring Chase's oldest daughter, Alice (Musee d'Orsay, Paris), and a 1908 self-portrait (Uffizi Gallery, Florence).