Indiana-born William Merritt Chase lived and painted in Manhattan, Munich, Venice, and the Netherlands.
[“Prospect Park, Brooklyn”]
But he also spent about four years residing in Brooklyn. Between 1887 and 1890, he and his new bride (and eventually their first-born daughter) lived with his parents in a home in the progressive, thriving city.
[“In Navy Yard”]
He was apparently taken by Brooklyn’s lovely new parks and more bucolic sections, as he painted many landscapes and scenes of everyday life in the borough’s less urban outposts.
[“Gravesend Bay (the Lower Bay)”]
His favorite places seemed to be Prospect Park, Tompkins Park (below, now renamed Herbert Von King Park), Gravesend Bay, and even the Brooklyn Navy Yard (above, his wife is holding the parasol).
[“The Park”]
Chase painted these pastoral parts of Brooklyn, “not only because they were part of his Brooklyn surroundings at the time; he also wanted to present them to the world as examples of ‘civilized urban landscapes’ that accorded with the European avant-garde model of modern life,” states the New York Times in an article on a Chase retrospective from 2000.
[“Harbor Scene, Brooklyn Docks”]
By the 1890s, after relocating to Manhattan, he depicted Central Park in several paintings. They are lovely, but his Brooklyn work captures the beauty of the City of Churches in full summer bloom.
Tags: Brooklyn docks, Brooklyn in the late 19th century, old Brooklyn scenes, Prospect Park paintings, Tompkins Park Brooklyn, William Merritt Chase, William Merritt Chase Brooklyn paintings
Ephemeral New York 
July 13, 2015 at 3:59 pm |
Beautiful “snapshots”. Oh that it could have stayed that way…meg
July 14, 2015 at 11:04 pm |
Thank you for sharing the work of William Merritt Chase. I hadn’t heard of him before this post and I’m really taken with his paintings. I’ll be looking into more of his work now.
June 20, 2016 at 7:37 am |
[…] hasn’t changed much since Francis Luis Mora, a Uruguayan-born illustrator and instructor at William Merritt Chase‘s School of Art, painted “Evening News—Subway Riders” (top) in […]
October 31, 2016 at 5:17 am |
[…] painter William Merritt Chase lived in Brooklyn from 1887 to 1890, and he often depicted it in his work: Prospect Park, Tompkins Park, and the East […]
February 27, 2017 at 8:27 am |
[…] haven’t been able to confirm Chase as the artist. But as a Brooklyn resident in the 1880s, he often focused on the city’s physical beauty as well as scenes of day-to-day life that […]
June 5, 2017 at 6:44 am |
[…] in Philadelphia in 1875, she honed her natural talents at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts and studied with sometime-Brooklynite William Merritt Chase. She traveled and painted in Europe and North Africa, set up studios in Gloucester, Massachusetts […]
July 22, 2019 at 4:50 am |
[…] of Central Park and Prospect Park in an 1891 Harper’s Weekly article, owing to his many evocative landscapes of these and other city green […]
July 22, 2019 at 10:46 am |
[…] interpreter” of Central Park and Prospect Park in an 1891 Harper’s Weekly article, owing to his many evocative landscapes of these and other city green […]
July 22, 2019 at 2:06 pm |
[…] interpreter” of Central Park and Prospect Park in an 1891 Harper’s Weekly article, owing to his many evocative landscapes of these and other city green […]