Artistic Echoes: Chase and Whistler
Exhibitions & Events
Elsa Smithgall, William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master exhibition curator, on Chase’s The Young Orphan.
William Merritt Chase, The Young Orphan, c. 1884. Oil on canvas, 44 x 42 in. National Academy Museum, New York
The Young Orphan is one of William Merritt Chase’s boldest early compositions, exemplifying his experimentation with an abstract, expressive language of color and form. Chase likely found his model for the picture from the Protestant Half Orphan Asylum, located next door to his Tenth Street studio at 61 West 10th Street. Thinly painted in gradations of red and black on a coarsely woven canvas, the painting recalls the atmospheric, subtle color harmonies in the work of the well-known American artist James Abbott McNeill Whistler, whom Chase greatly admired. Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black No. 1 (Portrait of the Artist’s Mother) had been a sensation in New York’s 1882 Society of American Artists exhibition and in the Paris Salon of 1883. The year after he completed this picture, Chase spent the summer with Whistler in London, where he produced the portrait of Whistler.
