William Merritt Chase

William Merritt Chase was born on November 1, 1849, in Williamsburg, Indiana, a locality later renamed Nineveh. As a child he took informal drawing lessons from a grammar school teacher, and after his family moved to Indianapolis he studied with the self-taught local painters Barton S. Hays and Jacob Cox. At twenty he moved to New York, studied briefly with the portrait painter Joseph Oriel Eaton, and then enrolled at the National Academy of Design, where he studied under Lemuel Wilmarth.

In 1872 Chase traveled to Munich to study at the Royal Academy, where he remained for six years and absorbed the dark palette and virtuoso brushwork associated with Wilhelm Leibl and the Munich circle. Afterward he traveled to Venice with fellow students Frank Duveneck and John Twachtman before returning to the United States. He went on to teach at the Art Students League, the New York School of Art, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and he founded both the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art on Long Island and his own Chase School of Art in New York, later renamed the New York School of Art and today part of Parsons School of Design. He was also a co-founder of the Society of American Painters in Pastel and a leading figure in the American revival of pastel work in the 1880s.

Chase died at his home in New York City on October 25, 1916. Contemporary obituaries, including one in The New York Times of October 26, 1916, and later confirmations from the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, are consistent on this date and location.

Chase's reputation rests on a dual legacy as painter and teacher, and both strands were reaffirmed by the major 2016 to 2017 traveling retrospective "William Merritt Chase: A Modern Master," organized with The Phillips Collection and the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. Critics have long framed Chase as a cosmopolitan figure whose career moved fluidly between Munich, Venice, Paris, and New York. Kenyon Cox is frequently cited for crediting him with an unusually wide influence on American painting through his teaching, a judgment echoed in the various medals and honors reported for Chase across exhibitions from the 1876 Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia into the early 1910s, though the exact list of citations varies across secondary sources. Recent scholarship, including reviews of the 2016 retrospective in Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide, has emphasized the range of his practice across portraiture, Shinnecock landscape, still life, and pastel, rather than treating him as a single-style Impressionist.

Chase's auction market is historical rather than headline-driven, and the record is not entirely settled. Market-data aggregators including MutualArt and Artprice cite an auction record of USD 6,649,000 for a work usually identified as I Think I Am Ready Now (The Mirror, The Pink Dress), sold on or about November 29, 2005, in New York; sources disagree on whether the sale took place at Christie's or Sotheby's, and this discrepancy has not been resolved in public reporting. A separate, far smaller sale has drawn local attention: a Mebane, North Carolina saleroom, Mebane Auction House, reported selling a previously unrecorded, untitled Chase painting for USD 850,000 around September 2010, a result it called unprecedented for its own saleroom; the work's title and the exact sale date were never published, and the result does not appear in major auction databases such as Artnet or Artprice. Below the record level, Chase's work also circulates steadily at moderate prices through smaller regional houses and secondary-market dealers such as Sullivan Goss, reflecting a market sustained by museum reputation and provenance rather than by frequent, high-value trades.

Chase's market sits well below the levels associated with blue-chip modern and contemporary names, and the exact all-time auction record is genuinely unsettled. Market databases including MutualArt and Artprice point to an auction record of about USD 6,649,000 for a 2005 New York sale, though the sources disagree on whether the house was Christie's or Sotheby's; a separate, unconfirmed report of an USD 850,000 sale at a Mebane, North Carolina auction house around 2010 has not been corroborated by major market databases. There is no confirmed, complete catalogue raisonne, which puts extra weight on museum provenance, exhibition history, and dealer documentation when evaluating a given work. His deep presence in institutions such as the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum is the strongest, most stable signal of his standing, and it is a more reliable guide for collectors than any single recent auction result.