Winter 2016

2016 Antiques & Fine Art 123 William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) Hall at Shinnecock, 1892 Pastel on canvas, 32⅛ x 41 inches Terra Foundation for American Art, Daniel J. Terra Collection; ©Terra Foundation for American Art, Chicago; courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston Bourguignon on as a co-curator for the project, becoming another valued member of the team. Erica later explained what led her to the initial conversation with Elsa about the exhibition, “I had been thinking about Chase for quite a long time since he’s such a wonderful painter and there are very important and beautiful works in Boston-area collections. I had started to speak with a number of colleagues, but it was in a chance discussion with Katie that I learned of Elsa’s interest and proposed exhibition; it was a very happy moment when we all agreed to work together!” By early 2013, the curators discussed various possible thematic approaches to the exhibition and the accompanying catalogue. The preliminary list of works for the show was refined to reflect the international stature of Chase during his career; his constant exploration of medium; and the evolution of his bravura brush style of painting into what is known as American Impressionism. In July of 2013, Elsa, Erica, Katie, and I met on a blue-sky, sun-shine morning to visit Chase’s summer home in Shinnecock Hills, Long Island. Designed by his friend Stanford White, the house, equidistant from Peconic Bay to the north and Shinnecock Bay to the south, was the locale for some of his most popular and beautiful paintings. We also looked at his teaching studio (now attached to a private residence), located several miles east of his home, in what is still known as the Art Village. The afternoon was spent with Alicia Longwell, curator of the Parrish Art Museum, in nearby Watermill, going through correspondence and photographs in the Chase archives collection founded by Ron Pisano when he was director of the museum. It was a wonderful, if exhausting trip back to the last decades of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth. By November 2013, the Foundazione Musei Civizi Venezia, with its president Gabriella Belli, had committed to the project, ensuring that Chase would receive his first solo exhibition abroad in the Ca’ Pesaro, a seventeenth-century Baroque palace facing the Grand Canal. Meanwhile, the Terra Foundation offered support