The great American artist William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) completed a wide variety of portraits over his long career. Among his subjects were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, New
York luminaries, and members of his family as well as a number of self-portraits. Chase’s ability to capture a likeness was renowned, yet it was his dashing and bravura brushwork that truly
set his portraits apart.
This highly anticipated book presents the entire collection of Chase’s known portraits in oil. Each is gorgeously reproduced, and many are published in color for the first time. This is the
second of four volumes cataloguing the complete works of William Merritt Chase. The catalogue raisonné project has presented immense challenges, for Chase kept no records at all, and
staggering numbers of forgeries of his work appeared soon after he died. Finding many of his portraits was especially difficult, as no log book of sitters has been located and no other
records exist for those works that were not publicly exhibited. Nevertheless, Ronald G. Pisano’s meticulous research has uncovered more than six hundred portraits in private and public
collections. Among the most notable are Chase’s penetrating portrait of James Abbott McNeill Whistler (The Metropolitan Museum of Art), a commanding portrait of Dora Wheeler (Cleveland
Museum of Art), The Feather Fan featuring Chase’s oldest daughter, Alice (Musée d’Orsay, Paris), and a 1908 self-portrait (Uffizi Gallery, Florence).
