Opinion: Fidgety Girl In a Sundress, Choice Chase at the Spanierman Gallery

By Robert Long

You can't help but feel sorry for William Merritt Chase's daughters. Again and again he dragged them, stifling and itchy in starched white summer frocks and sunhats, with ribbons in their hair, clutching wilting bouquets of flowers, out into the scrubby fields around the Chase house in Shinnecock Hills, to stand around or sit in the grass for hours. Bored and hot, they would kick at things in the grass while he stood there at his easel making little motions with his brushes and shouting at them to stand still.

The pictures of the little girls in the Southampton hills have come to be considered classics of American Impressionism, though Chase, who was annoyed with categories and disliked the scientific pretensions of French Impressionist painters, called himself a realist. Whatever the labels art historians slap on his work, we know it to be extraordinary, and it is always worth a trip to see a first-rate or even a second-rate Chase.

The Spanierman Gallery, which has taken over the spacious premises lately vacated by the Lizan Tops Gallery, off Newtown Lane in East Hampton, has mounted a fine show of "Long Island Landscapes, 1870s-1920s," by a handful of big names (Chase, Childe Hassam, Thomas Moran) and a lot of lesser figures (Henry and Edith Prellwitz, Arthur B. Davies, Bruce Crane, and Thomas Moran's younger brothers, Percy, Peter, and Edward). There are a few off-topic inclusions - still lifes, a Raphael Soyer picture of boats, and a Chase pastel of a canal in Holland - but they are good pictures.

Chase came to the Shinnecock Hills in Southampton at the behest of some extremely wealthy people who thought it would be a good place to start a summer art school, and decided that he - charming, worldly, and famous - was the perfect man to run it. They paid him well and gave him a summer house a few miles west of the school.

Chase was always looking for ways to make money, since he had a wife and eight children to support and a lavish lifestyle to maintain, including, at one point, a kind of houseboy-butler who followed him around in robes and a fez. At one point, Chase taught at three art schools simultaneously (he founded two of them), while taking commissions and trying to get his own work done.

In the years of the Shinnecock Summer School of Art - the mid-1890s through 1910 or so - the rich were getting very much richer at an astonishing rate, the value of South Fork land was doubling weekly, and New Yorkers with money to burn were legion. As in all times of prosperity, particular attention was paid to art, as a hobby, as a form of therapy, as an investment. The summer school came along at the right time and in the right place.

With the advent of modernism, though, both it and Chase fell out of fashion. By the time he died, in 1916, he had been shoved aside by younger, more experimental painters - he was intentionally excluded from the Armory Show - and his paintings were selling for peanuts. (Not any more. A small second-rate landscape in the Spanierman show is advertised for $325,000).

Chase was a driving force in American art. He was a painter of enormous skill, a kind of generalist who could make impressionistic landscapes, large theatrical portraits, and classically oriented still lifes and interiors, as well as pictures that defy category. He jumped genres with ease.

He was a small-town Indiana boy who studied in Germany before making his name in New York. He was a charmer, and a master of what has come to be called "networking." Like his good friend Stanford White, he knew all the right people and he knew how to play them. But beyond that, he was an inspiring teacher and a tireless propagandist for the importance of American art at a time when American painters were considered bumpkins.

Chase fell in love with his wife, Alice Dieudonne, when she was 14. The oldest of their eight kids, Dorothy, posed for their father dozens and dozens of times in dozens and dozens of costumes. The most remarkable picture in the Spanierman show, "Sunset at Shinnecock Hills," is one of those itchy-sundress-in-the-scrub-grass pictures, notable for its treatment of light and for the expression of Dorothy Chase, who looks like she has just about had it.

She stands in the middle distance, shading her eyes with one hand as she stares into the sun, which has descended far enough so that the bottom half of the otherwise yellow-blasted picture is muted. Chase has drained the brightness from that part of the canvas, and that makes it memorable and separates it from his usual sunny outdoor works.

Dorothy seems literally to be sinking into the shadow, which rises like water almost to her waist. Isn't it about time to go home, she seems to be asking. We've been here long enough.

Chase wasn't the first significant painter to come to the South Fork but he was the most influential and the most important artist to work here for an extended period of time until the mid-1940s, when Pollock and friends showed up under very different circumstances (they were poor). It was Chase who helped to convince collectors that there was something of value in American painting at a time when artists such as William Glackens were used mainly as scouts - Albert Barnes (of the Barnes Foundation) sent Glackens to France to pick out Renoirs for him to buy.

Thomas Moran came to East Hampton a dozen years before Chase made it to Shinnecock, and Spanierman has a very good and unusually bright Moran watercolor and pencil painting, "East Hampton Beach," made in 1878, not long after he first arrived on Main Street.

The transparent blues and clean whites are unusual for Moran, who tended toward muddy earth tones or an artificial-looking supernatural glow, leftover conventions from French realist painting. You become aware of a kind of Presbyterian gloom in many of Moran's East Hampton pictures once you get them in a room with a lively, clear Chase or two, so this Moran watercolor is refreshing to see.

There is a terrific Chase painting of his backyard, complete with doghouse, that is full of the kind of slick, midrange liquid greens that we more often associate with Fairfield Porter and his followers - this picture in fact anticipates Porter by about 70 years.

Raphael Soyer's "Beach at Sag Harbor" has the flattish look of early modernism, and a restrained palette of grays and blues that suggests that light on a day when a bank of clouds has suddenly obscured what had been a very bright sun in a clear sky. Peter Moran's pleasant, fluid pencil drawings of Hook Pond, "The Old Wiborg Farm," and other East Hampton Village scenes are enlivened by patches of white gouache; they were made on a visit to his older brother in 1886.

All of the Morans could draw, and Mary Nimmo Moran, Thomas's wife, was one of the better etchers in an era when etching was the hippest of art forms.

Bruce Crane's view of Town Pond in 1880 is as beautiful a picture as anything Moran made, and it has a freshness and clarity in its treatment of shimmery still water, bright white ducks, and a bristly tree or two against an oxygenated, gray-blue sky. Other works to look out for in the show, which can be seen through July 18, are Harry Roseland's 1888 picture of "Peapickers of Long Island," which is straight out of Barbizon, and the Prellwitz pictures, which are lively and pretty but somehow not quite lively enough to stay with you for very long.