Interpretive Resource

William Merritt Chase’s paintings of public parks in Brooklyn and Manhattan are intimate renditions of familiar locations that chart the artist’s response both to America’s rapid urban growth and to contemporary French painting. Although Chase studied at the Royal Academy in Munich from 1872 to 1877, his mature style, which evolved in the 1880s, was inspired by diverse international art movements. An early example of Chase’s park scenes, A City Park exhibits the dramatic spatial effects, high-keyed palette, and intimate scale of French Impressionist painting, as opposed to the dark palette and impasto brushwork promoted by the Munich School.

The strong light, vivid color, and fluid handling of A City Park suggest a spontaneous method of composition rather than a studio production. Like the French Impressionists, Chase probably composed his composition en plein-air, as he indicated in comments on his own technique in the periodical Art Amateur: "When I start to paint out of doors I put myself in as light marching order as possible; that is, I have every thing made as portable and with as little weight as it can be. . . . I carry a comfortable stool that can be closed up in a small space, and I never use an umbrella. I want all the light I can get. When I have found the spot I like, I set up my easel, and paint the picture on the spot. I think that is the only way rightly to interpret nature." The small scale of this work conforms to Chase’s practice of painting outdoors unburdened by unnecessary or bulky materials. For twelve consecutive summers, from 1891 to 1903, Chase espoused the merits of plein-air landscape painting to students at Shinnecock Hills Summer School, which he had founded on Long Island. Chase’s method ultimately had widespread impact on succeeding generations of American painters.

New aspects of Chase’s park scenes have recently been explored by Barbara Dayer Gallati, who traced the artist’s use of familiar locations and family members in his paintings and concluded that "his art was most often the expression of external reality molded to portray his private world." Gallati further noted that the subject of A City Park is most likely Tompkins Park, in Brooklyn, rather than Prospect Park, as previously assumed. A David H. Chase perhaps Chase’s father, David Hester Chase lived on a street bordering the park. An 1888 Art Amateur review identifies several of Chase’s paintings of "charming, sparkling bits of out-door life" as depicting locations in New York City. Perhaps directly referring to the Art Institute’s canvas, the review adds: "The scene on a summer day in Tompkins Park, with the figures of a lady and child admirably introduced, is brilliantly executed and is full of atmosphere."

Designed in 1870–71 by Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux, the landscape architects who planned both Prospect and Central Parks, Tompkins Park in Brooklyn was intended to "form a cheerful, bright, and refreshing object to be observed from the adjoining streets and houses . . . [and accommodate] agreeable exercise, rest, and social intercourse in the open air." A City Park adheres to Olmsted’s dictum by showing a series of brownstones partially obscured by trees in the background. The brownstone-lined avenues visible in the painting delineate the boundaries of the park and define the space as a city square rather than Olmsted and Vaux’s rambling parks with paths that twist and turn. The diagonally receding pathway that dramatically draws the viewer into A City Park further echoes the straight, gravel-paved arteries of Tompkins Park. A perspectival device favored by Chase, the strong diagonal creates the illusion of a wide spatial expanse more like a French boulevard than the path of a city park. Gustave Caillebotte and Giuseppe de Nittis, artists Chase admired, used this device to great effect in representing Paris after Baron Haussmann’s 1854–70 renovation of the city. Chase’s A City Park makes use of a combination of influences from the artist’s personal familiarity with the location to recent Impressionist innovations in painting method and subject matter, to depict a contemporary scene of a new urban landscape.