Winter 2016

Winter 124 www.afamag.com | w ww.incollect.com top William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) Boy Smoking (The Apprentice) , 1875 Oil on canvas, 37⅛ x 23 inches Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, Connecticut Purchased through the gift of James Junius Goodwin; Allen Phillips/Wadsworth Atheneum; courtesy, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston bottom William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) Still Life—Fish , about 1900 Oil on canvas, 44½ x 56⅛ inches The Hayden Collection—Charles Henry Hayden; Photograph © Museum of Fine Arts, Boston for adding outside international and domestic scholars to enrich the planning process with a range of additional perspectives. The Terra also agreed to sponsor a writer’s workshop, where the catalogue’s authors could discuss topics to be covered. In April 2014, the first round of loan requests for forty- five key works was sent out. The entire team was in place, which now included John Davis, professor of American art history at Smith College (now the executive director for Europe and global academic programs, Terra Foundation for American Art), and Giovanna Ginex, independent curator for the Foundazione Musei Civici di Venezia. At the writers’ workshop, which took place in November 2014, at the Phillips Collection, John Davis provided fascinating minutiae about Chase, while Giovanna filled us in on Chase’s years in Italy (in addition to his time teaching in Venice, he spent five summers, 1907–1912, teaching American students in Florence). Everyone discussed the topic he or she would cover in each of the five catalogue essays. I was invited to contribute a Foreword to the catalogue, which I felt should reveal the kind of man Chase was—ambitious, self-assured, ready to try new and different mediums, a joiner of art clubs and organizations, kind and supportive to his students, a loving husband and father, and a voice proclaiming the new role of American art on the world stage. By early 2015, images were being requested from lenders, the first drafts of catalogue essays were submitted to copy editors, and loan request agreements were beginning to be processed. In May, the final catalogue manuscript was submitted to Yale University Press. Things were moving fast. In July all loans were finalized and digitized images were submitted to the publisher. As the end of the year approached it was time to begin the exhibition design and layout, and planning began for related programs at each museum venue. The final tally of lenders included forty museums and twenty private collections. In February 2016, while the catalogue was at the printer, shipping arrangements were finalized; crates were built, pickups were organized, last minute inspections of