Description
This highly anticipated book presents all of the collection of Chase’s known portraits in oil. Each and every is gorgeously reproduced, and many are published in color for the first time. This is the second one 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 used to be especially difficult, as no log book of sitters has been located and no other records exist for those works that were not publicly exhibited. On the other hand, Ronald G. Pisano’s meticulous research has uncovered more than six hundred portraits in private and public collections. A number of 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).