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Idle Hours is an oil-on-canvas landscape painting by the American Impressionist painter William Merritt Chase. Completed in 1894, it measures 90.2 by 64.8 centimeters, and is now housed at the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, Fort Worth. [1]
After accepting this position in 1891, he quickly established a reputation as a charismatic teacher of plein-air painting, and he and his students made many works showing the undeveloped coastline near the school, including Idle Hours, one of Chase’s largest Shinnecock Hills landscapes.
Idle Hours shows Chase’s wife in a red bonnet with two of her daughters and possibly his sister-in-law. The group enjoys a perfect day of sunshine and sea breeze while indulging in the...
- Childhood and Education
- Early Training
- Mature Period
- Later Period
- The Legacy of William Merritt Chase
The eldest of six children, William Merritt Chase was born to Sarah Swaim and David Hester Chase. He demonstrated an aptitude for art from an early age by copying images from his favorite books. According to author Katharine Metcalf Roof, Chase's "interest in art made him different from his classmates, many of whom teased him and of which he later ...
At the age of nineteen, Chase succumbed to youthful wanderlust and, on a whim, decided he wanted to become a sailor. With his father's blessing, he and a friend traveled to Annapolis where he was commissioned to a merchant ship. Not long into his a three-month voyage, Chase realized that the nautical life was not for him; a realization aided by the...
By the time Chase returned home in 1878, he had already begun, in the words of Hirshler, to "build his American reputation by sending paintings from Munich to New York City for display". Once settled again in New York, he took his first teaching positions at the newly formed Art Student League. Chase felt it vitally important to his reputation that...
Between 1891 and 1902, Chase and his family spent their summers at a purpose-built home and studio in Shinnecock Hills, a close suburb of the upmarket town of Southampton on the south shore of Long Island (roughly 100 miles east of New York). Chase set up, and taught two days a week, at the nearby Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art which benefit...
Chase had a profound impact on shaping the development of modern art in the United States. As curator Erica Hirshler explains, "Chase developed an American version of Impressionism to depict modern subjects" and started incorporating other modern artmaking techniques in the way he "often employed daringly abstract compositions, devising interlockin...
- American
- November 1, 1849
- Williamsburg, Indiana
- October 25, 1916
Aug 29, 2016 · “Idleness opens up for any one who has eyes to see and a mind to dream a playground of infinite variety,” wrote novelist Arthur Pier in 1904 for the magazine Atlantic Monthly.1 William Merritt Chase had eyes to see the liberating benefits of idleness, and he found motifs of infinite variety in America’s playgrounds. Catching his subjects ...
Amon Carter Museum of American Art. Fort Worth, Texas, United States. Details. Title: Idle Hours. Creator: William Merritt Chase. Date Created: 1894. Physical Dimensions: 64.8 x 90.2 cm....
Mrs. Chase is dressed in white with a bright right bonnet. She is reading, her parasol tossed to the side. The two youngest girls, also dressed in white, lounge on pillows, while the Mrs. Chase's sister sits nearby, her pale green parasol resting over her shoulder. Ca. 1894. Control number. IAP 50900270. Type. Paintings. Medium. Oil on canvas.
