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Another owner WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE (1849-1916) Woman in Kimono Holding a Japanese Fan signe...

Currency:USD Category:Everything Else / Other Start Price:NA Estimated At:200,000.00 - 300,000.00 USD
Another owner WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE (1849-1916) Woman in Kimono Holding a Japanese Fan signe...
Another owner
WILLIAM MERRITT CHASE
(1849-1916) Woman in Kimono
Holding a Japanese Fan
signed "Chase" (lower left)
oil on canvas
12 x 10 in. (35 x 25.5 cm)
<p>Estimate: $200,000-300,000 <p> Provenance
A Massachusetts Estate <p> This painting will be included in the catalogue raisonné of works by William Merritt Chase. A letter from Mr. D. Fredrick Baker will accompany this lot. <p> In 1878, William Merritt Chase acquired Albert Bierstadt's former studio in the Tenth Street Studio building in Manhattan. He quickly turned it into a showplace, filled not only with exotic objects from Europe, Asia, and Africa, but also with the works of other artists as well as his own. Often illustrated in periodicals as the ideal artist's studio, it became not only a rendezvous for Chase's friends, students, and clients, but also a frequent subject of his paintings. <p> The series of studio pictures that Chase executed mainly in the 1880s not only provides accurate documentation of the Tenth Street interior, but ...records the studio's many purposes. It was a gallery and a showplace, of course, but it was also a place for painting, study, meditation, teaching, and theatrical entertainment. Above all, Chase's studio paintings are works of art made for the eye to feast upon.1 <p> In his paintings of his studio, the artist, besides depicting patrons and students, also portrays his models. Such a model appears in Weary, circa 1889, (Private Collection), where she is shown resting in a chair among the objects with which she would have been posing earlier. Among these objects are the same yellow silk pillow and four-legged Chinese bronze pot that appear in Woman in Kimono Holding a Japanese Fan. <p>While the model in Weary does not wear a kimono, many of the women in Chase's paintings of the 1880s do. Such works as Girl in Japanese Kimono, circa 1890 (Brooklyn Museum), Making Her Toilet, pastel, circa 1889 (Private Collection)-in both of which the model wears the blue-gray kimono seen in Woman in Kimono Holding a Japanese Fan-reflect a general Western European fascination with Japanese culture as well as Chase's love of decorative effect. <p>In addition to its place among Chase's studio paintings, Woman in Kimono Holding a Japanese Fan also reveals an important aspect of his teaching style. Among his students, Chase's generosity was legendary. That generosity was often expressed in grand gestures. On "demonstration days," when Chase would provide a narrated painting demonstration for his class, he would often give the completed demonstration to one of his students as a prize for excellence. <p>Executed in Chase's inimitably dashing style on the left side of the painting, but unfinished on the right, Woman in Kimono Holding a Japanese Fan is almost certainly one of these demonstration pieces because of the signature that appears in the lower left corner. According to D. Frederick Baker, who is completing Ronald G. Pisano's catalogue raisonné of the works of William Merritt Chase, Chase invariably signed his gifts to his students simply "Chase," rather than giving them the fuller signature that he used in the paintings he exhibited and sold to his clients.
<p>We are grateful to Dr. Bruce Chambers for cataloguing this lot. <p> Notes 1 Barbara Dayer Gallati, William Merritt Chase, New York, 1995, p. 43.
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