Venice meant not a great deal to Chase. He painted it, but in the formal Munich manner, and with little of the local light or color of the place. While there he fell upon hard times, was in financial straits, and became ill, possibly as the result of privations. But he continued painting, and, what is more astonishing, while in dire poverty he began collecting all sorts of artistic plunder. This was the beginning of a taste that he indulged in all his life. He bought pictures, rugs, brocades, silks, brass, guns, swords, jewels, rings—anything that was beautiful or artistic in design or color. At different times he had large collections of antiquities, and was ever hunting for more. At Venice he added two monkeys to his possessions, and when a few months later he returned to New York and took his Tenth Street studio he had several strange parrots and odd dogs as adjuncts to the place. The high walls of the big studio were hung with bits of tapestries, old velvets, pictures; the floor was covered with Oriental rugs; the tables were littered with clocks, pistols, old books, brass bowls; and the screens were draped with silks and brocades. It was the first “artistic” studio in New York.
This was in 1877 and Chase had returned to New York to become a teacher in the newly established Art Students League. That was the beginning of his long and very useful career as a teacher. The Art Students League and the Society of American Artists were started about the same time, the Metropolitan Museum having preceded them by a few years. The movement for art was under way and Chase had arrived at the psychological moment. Associated with Beckwith, Blum, Shirlaw, and others he immediately took a positive interest in current art matters. The big studio became the gathering-place of the young men, where resolutions were passed and committees were set in motion. Society also found its way there, for Chase gave Saturday receptions when the door with the vibrating lyre on the back of it was swung open by a colored servant in fez and gown, and pictures and antiquities were displayed and talked about by the painter himself. At other times dinners and dances were given there, to which came many notables. People from the opera sang, Carmencita danced, and society people posed in picture-frames for the characters of Titian and Van Dyck. Chase had a decided vogue, social as well as artistic, almost from the very start.
As a painter he was taken seriously and received his meed of praise with few dissenting voices. Almost every one in the press and magazines hailed him as the much-needed person—the man who technically knew how to paint. His pictures at no time ever sold very well, but that was for the reason perhaps that they never possessed an intimate human interest, not because they were indifferently painted. On the whole, though some of the elders looked askance at his broad brushing, or thought his themes somewhat material and superficial, he had no grievance of a Whistler kind against either critic or public. The art clubs elected him to membership, he spent his first summer after his return in a trip through the Erie Canal with the Tile Club, in 1880 he became a member of the Society of American Artists, and in 1883 its president. The same year he had organized and sent to Munich the first group of American pictures for exhibition there.
A curiosity as to how art had been produced by other people, in other times and countries as well as our own, was always with Chase. He was a great traveller, a great student of art, a great haunter of galleries and museums. In the thirty or more years that I knew him I had met him at different times in almost every gallery of Europe. Only a year or so before the Great War I was working in the Uffizi one hot July afternoon after every one had left the place. I had been alone for several hours when I heard steps approaching me down the long corridor. It was late and one of the attendants was probably coming to tell me it was time to close. But no; instead of that I heard in very good English:
“At it again, I see! At it again!”
I turned around to find Chase standing there. He, too, had stayed on in the heat after the crowd had gone, and had no doubt been prying into some Titian or questioning some Rembrandt or Rubens!
For many years he kept voyaging to Europe summer after summer. I never chanced to cross with him, but one spring, while bidding farewell to some friends who were sailing, I saw Chase jump out of a cab and scramble up the landing-stage—the last man to arrive—and still giving some directions over his shoulder to his colored man, who remained on the dock. On every steamer he sailed in he organized art, painted the cabin or smoke-room panels, sketched the captain, and made a portrait of the ship’s beauty. Arrived in Europe, he went to see not only exhibitions and museums but brothers of the craft in their studios. He spoke no French, Spanish, or Italian, and had only a limited vocabulary in German, but that made no difference. He got on better with Boldini and Alfred Stevens in Paris using the sign language than with Whistler in London exchanging biting English. Everywhere he was welcomed and treated as a man of distinction in his profession, and everywhere he saw something new and was perhaps influenced thereby.
He was eager to learn and susceptible to impression—so much so that he was said to have followed at different times Leibl, Stevens, Rico, Fortuny, Whistler; but the things which Chase followed were minor matters of handling or arrangement and did not affect his personal point of view. They were superficial fancies and were soon merged, fused, or abandoned. Some of the old masters, Velasquez, Titian, Hals, Rembrandt, had a stronger influence upon him, but these men he never tried to follow. It was their high artistic plane that gave him inspiration. Standing before Titian’s “Young Englishman” in the Pitti, his admiration for its superb poise and lofty dignity was unbounded. It was faultless and flawless intellectually and technically. The left eye was out of drawing, but Titian intended it so. It gave the face more character. He never even wanted to suspect that the restorer in the cleaning-room was perhaps responsible for the bad drawing of the eye. Titian was above criticism.
Chase was never mean in his enthusiasms. He loved whole-heartedly. Before Velasquez at Madrid everything was just as it should be. He was the greatest of them all—the master craftsman of the craft; in the Louvre he protested that no one had ever equalled or approached such still-life painting as that of Chardin; at Haarlem he was just as unstinted in praise of Frans Hals. And he was right about them all. He was a very good judge of pictures and picked out no questionable masters for admiration. Where he found a great masterpiece in a gallery, there he unslung his kit, sat down, and made a copy. He at different times produced very remarkable copies of Velasquez, Hals, Rembrandt, Rubens, Van Dyck, Ribera, Watteau. Whatever past art had to teach, Chase was eager to learn. He kept a receptive mind and a live interest in all phases of painting, and had more inherent knowledge of craftsmanship than any of his contemporaries. The literary history of art he knew nothing about, and probably could not have told within a hundred years when Velasquez or Hals was born. That side of art has small interest for artists, and for Chase it was more or less of a blank space.
His summer trips to Europe began in 1881, when he went to Paris and Madrid, making in the latter city a copy of the “Tapestry Weavers.” The next year he was again in Spain with Blum and Vinton. At that time Madrid was a great place for brass, pictures, stuffs, curios, and Chase bought without stint. He needed materials for still-life pictures and, besides, the big Tenth Street studio absorbed no end of furnishings. The summer of 1883 found him in Holland, living at Zandvoort with Blum, and painting Blum in a large garden-picture called “The Tiff.” In 1885 he went to see Whistler in London. They started out on terms of mutual admiration, painted each other’s portraits, travelled in Holland together, but finally ended up by quarrelling. The Whistler portrait of Chase has disappeared, or at least its whereabouts, if it still exists, is unknown; but the Chase portrait of Whistler is extant and now in the Metropolitan Museum. Whistler declared it “a monstrous lampoon,” and he was about right in saying so. It is Whistler the poseur, not the real man. Certain eccentricities or personal peculiarities were so extravagantly presented that the characterization became little less than caricature.