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signed Wm. M. Chase, l.l.

oil on canvas

Painted in 1913.

This painting is included in Ronald G. Pisano's Catalogue of Known and Documented Works by William Merritt Chase (1849-1916), Volume IV.

A letter from Mr. D. Frederick Baker will accompany the lot.
PROVENANCE

Acquired by the present owner's uncle before 1960
EXHIBITED

Indianapolis, Indiana, John Herron Art Institute, 7th Annual Exhibition of Works by Indiana Artists, March-April 1914, no. 43
San Francisco, California, Palace of the Fine Arts, Panama-Pacific International Exposition, 1915, no. 3754
CATALOGUE NOTE

William Merritt Chase was among the American Impressionists honored with his own gallery at the 1915 Panama-Pacific International Exposition in San Francisco where he chose to exhibit Friendly Advice. He was a member of the art committee for the exposition, which would prove to be the last major showing of his work before his death. In this rediscovered painting, Chase captured the decorative beauty of an elegant Italianate salon adorned with pilasters, ornamental furniture and paintings with spontaneous, painterly brushstrokes and a light, colorful palette. Friendly Advice recalls Chase's elaborate studio interiors, which feature the artist's personal collection of paintings and objects, most particularly A Friendly Call (1895, oil on canvas, 30 1/4 by 48 1/4 in., National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), a similar painting in terms of both title and subject, set in Chase's elegant summer house at Shinnecock Hills, Long Island. Painted nearly two decades earlier, A Friendly Call depicts the artist's wife Alice listening attentively to a visitor, who is still wearing her hat and gloves and carrying a parasol.

In the 1890s Chase established a summer school of art in Shinnecock Hills on the eastern end of Long Island where he taught the principles of painting out of doors with emphasis on the momentary effects of light and atmosphere. After leading these highly successful classes for more than a decade, Chase decided to transfer his summer instruction to Europe so that his students would also be exposed to the art of the Old World. According to Ronald G. Pisano, "Chase was now concerned that Americans would become overconfident and lose sight of their art's relationship to Europe. His European tours, conducted almost every summer between 1903 and 1913, were intended to provide aspiring young artists with a broader perspective" (A Leading Spirit in American Art: William Merritt Chase, 1849-1916, Seattle, Washington, 1983, p. 135).

Chase's summer classes were based in various artistic centers of Europe, including Paris, London, Munich and, in 1907, Florence. That summer he moved into a lovely villa in the hills of Fiesole overlooking the city and returned to Italy nearly every year thereafter basing his classes in Florence or Venice. Friendly Advice was painted in Venice during the summer of 1913. Mr. Pisano writes, "The summer of 1913 Chase held what would be his last summer class abroad. By this time he had given up all his teaching posts in America and art students were reminded in the brochure for the summer class that this would be 'practically the only opportunity afforded of studying under Mr. Chase....' The class, which was to be held in Venice, was limited to thirty. Its itinerary, described as 'an ideal summer vacation for art lovers,' was similar to that of the summer class he held in Italy three years earlier. The group left New York in late May and stopped at Madeira, Gibraltar, and Genoa before arriving in Naples on June eighth. Five days were spent in Naples and its environs. The group then traveled on to Rome for a stay of ten days and stopped in Siena for a day on their way to Florence. After five days in Florence, they left for the final destination, Venice, where they stayed for seven weeks, studying the paintings of the Renaissance masters and sketching either outdoors or in a studio" (A Leading Spirit in American Art: William Merritt Chase, 1849-1916, p. 142).

Widely versed in the works of his contemporaries, Chase was familiar not only with the French Impressionists whom he had met on his trips abroad, but also with an international coterie of artists including Alfred Stevens, James Tissot and James McNeill Whistler. The easy elegance captured in Friendly Advice was familiar territory for fashionable European painters like Stevens, a Belgian artist whom Chase greatly admired. Beginning in the 1850s, Stevens developed a passion for painting pictures set in his own studio, which were avidly collected by prominent American patrons such as William K. Vanderbilt. Chase himself owned nine paintings by Stevens, undoubtedly among the inspirations for his own sumptuous interior scenes. In Friendly Advice, a fashionable view of domestic leisure, Chase assimilates the inspiration of an earlier generation of European artists with the taste and sensibility of turn-of-the-century America.