States—an educational endeavor then without precedent in this country. In the years immediately before
with William he accepted the offer and moved his summer operations to Shinnecock on Long Island, Chase did some outdoor painting in New York City. The resulting works have been cited as the first purely Impressionist paintings in America and, in a break with the pastoral tradition, the first landscape paintings done in our urban parks.
In the late 1880s, Chase painted in Prospect Park in Brooklyn; when a bureaucratic snafu denied him permission to return in the spring of 1890, he went to Central Park in Manhattan instead. It was there that he painted In the Park—A By-path, a domestic snapshot of Chase’s young family. His daughter Cosy pauses
■ Jerry Weiss teaches studio art at the Lyme Academy College of Fine Arts in Old Lyme, Connecticut. To see his work, visit www. jerrynweiss.com.
Landscape painting was not William Merritt Chase’s original interest. As a young man, he left the United States to study the portrait and figure for six years in Munich, where he turned to outdoor work as an extracurricular pursuit. Eventually Chase became so proficient in the genre that he was invited to found a school for summer landscape painting in the United
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