“Painting Artists’ Studios in the Late Nineteenth Century: William Merritt Chase (1849–1916) in Context” at Terra Foundation Paris Center & Library

May 18, 2017
Terra Foundation Paris Center & Library

In the late nineteenth century, the artist’s studio developed into an important motif, depicted as a social, professional, commercial, and imaginary space. The American painter William Merritt Chase, for example, repeatedly pictured his own ateliers, including the celebrated Tenth Street Studio Building in New York, along with other spaces in the United States and abroad, primarily during the 1880s and 1890s. By comparing Chase’s practices with European approaches to the artist’s studio, this dialogue will place his works in context and explore How did the late nineteenth-century atelier interweave private and public, training and mise en scène, inspiration and enterprise? This dialogue corresponds with the exhibition William Merritt Chase (1849–1916): A Painter between New York and Venice.

Speakers:

  • Alain Bonnet is Professor of Art History at the Université Grenoble Alpes. He is the author of L’Enseignement des arts au XIXe siècle. La réforme de l’École des Beaux-Arts de 1863 et la fin du modèle académique (2006) and L’Artiste itinérant. Le Prix du Salon et les bourses du voyage distribuées par l’État français (1874–1914) (2015), among other books. He co-curated the exhibitions Devenir peintre au XIXe siècle. Baudry, Bouguereau, Lenepveu (2007) and L’Artiste en représentation. Images de l’artiste dans l’art du XIXe siècle (2012).
  • James Glisson is the Bradford and Christine Mishler Assistant Curator of American Art at The Huntington Library, where he curated A World of Strangers: Crowds in American Art (2015–16), Real American Places: Edward Weston and Leaves of Grass (2016–17), and the forthcoming exhibition Frederick Hammersley: To Paint without Thinking. His essays have appeared in Artforum, Afterimage, and in collective works such as The Artist’s Garden: American Impressionism and the Garden Movement, 1887–1920 (2015) and The Eight and American Modernism (2009). He is presently writing on Chase’s studio pictures.

Videography by Romain Grésillon.