William Merritt Chase
William Merritt Chase was born on November 1st, 1849 in Nineveh, Indiana. Throughout his lifetime, he expanded his oeuvre to include portraiture, landscapes, and still life, eventually coming to be regarded as one of American Impressionism’s most prominent painters and teachers.
The loose, organic brushwork that initially garnered him the attention of his instructors came fully into form in his later landscape paintings. In 1891, Chase (reluctantly) accepted a position teaching at the Shinnecock School in Southampton, Long Island. For the next two decades he was a well-loved and respected teacher in the school’s Art Village, the first to teach painting en plein air. “The Bayberry Bush,” painted in 1895, displays the carefree brushwork Chase used to such success. It features three young women walking amongst the scrub in the foreground of a rural, gambrel-roofed house. Known for prominently presenting figures in his landscapes, Chase made them the only sources of pure white in the image besides the clouds, going so far as to garnish the outfit of the subject on the far right with a red bow.
The earth tones that comprise the low vegetation are reflected in the grey shingles and red brick of the house in the background, blurring the lines between landscape and residence. In the distance the earth slopes gradually, meeting a faintly clouded horizon that lightens as it disappears. Chase creates a gentle whimsy in a landscape that had been considered barren and even depressing by some of his contemporaries. As a result, American Impressionist landscape painting spread to such locations as Cape Cod, Massachusetts and Mendota, Minnesota, as well as Carmel, California.