William Merritt Chase

William Merritt Chase, like most American Impressionists, is less well known than his French colleagues of the same school, but paintings of his such as "The Nursery" remind us that Chase, like other American Impressionists, created works of both subtlety and passion. This particular painting, probably created in 1890 and representing Chase's mid-career work, is less full of movement, a bit less sun-kissed, and less stylistically dazzling than the work of French Impressionists in the generation before. But it is full of the quiet intensity that marked so much of American painting as the nineteenth century fell away into the 20th and is possessed of both a near technically perfect sense of balance along with the kind of intriguing narrative that is often missing from what we might call more classically pure Impressionist works.

In his use of perspective and line in this painting, Chase presages the rise of Modernist dicta that would come about in full force in the first decades of the 20th century. The long lines of the wooden frames around the beds as well as the long lines of the reddish building to the left both lead our eye backward into the painting as lines of perspective are supposed to do. But there is none of the subtlety that we might have seen in a painting fifty - or a hundred - years older than this. There is no chance for the eye to wander from one form and set of lines in the painting to another, gradually drawing us farther and farther in to the images, colors

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Category: Arts - W