William Merritt Chase: volume 2 of The Catalogue Raisonnee by Ronald G. Pisano & D. Fred Baker

Artist Monographs Should Have Better Plates | William Merritt Chase: The Complete Catalogue of Known and Documented Work by William Merritt Chase ... | Ronald G. Pisano

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	• William Merritt Chase: The Complete Catalogue of Known and Documented Work by William Merritt Chase ... Ronald G. Pisano Yale University Press, 2007 - 296 pages average customer review:based on 3 reviews view larger image
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A Beautiful Book!

This has to be one of my MOST favourite art books ive ever bought, and i own a few hundred! :O)
The Text, Reproductions and Layout is Superb!, If you are even remotely interested in Painting this has to be a MUST buy!
Being an artist myself, i can say that it is a treat to see WM Chases Portrait sketches which are always left with lovely unfinished brush strokes scattered around the canvas. Something which we dont see enough of, and being a life long student of painting is a pleasure to witness from a time we can now only dream about.
Buy this book and study the gorgeous paintings you will spend a lifetime learning from the Master!

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William Merritt Chase: volume 2 of The Catalogue Raisonnee by Ronald G. Pisano & D. Fred Baker

This book is truly a work of painstaking research resulting in beautiful reproductions of works by William Merritt Chase one of Americas leading most brilliant artists of his day. It is the second volume in the Catalogue Raisonnee. His influence is seen in the works of many other leading artists who were his students. William Merritt Chase: Portraits in Oil (Complete Catalogue of Known and Documented Work by William Merritt Chase (1849 - 1916) has 2 more volumes yet to be published by Yale University Press. The artist is my grandfather.

Artist Monographs Should Have Better Plates

I recommend this book, but with some hesitation. There are some incredible pieces of artwork in this volume, most notably Chase's portrait sketches, many of which I had never seen before. However, this printing brings up the question "for whom are art books intended ?" I always want the largest, clearest plates with the best colors, but in this book by Pisano, it seems it was more important to list them all, rather than to represent them pictorially in the best light. There are photocopies OF photocopies of some images, and full-page images which are blurry, and yet you still find wonderful little treasures scattered throughout, but printed at only four times the size of a postage stamp.

Why then do I give it 5 stars? The artwork is still wonderful (despite being small and too often B & W), and there is nothing else like it on the market.

I do hope this book on Chase leads to more, and that the next might be made up entirely of larger plates of his color portrait studies; I would pay the same for a volume of 25 of those as I did for this catalog raisonné .

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The great American artist William Merritt Chase (1849?1916) completed a wide variety of portraits over his long career. Among his subjects were presidents, businessmen, celebrities, New York luminaries, and members of his family as well as a number of self-portraits. Chase?s ability to capture a likeness was renowned, yet it was his dashing and bravura brushwork that truly set his portraits apart.
This highly anticipated book presents the entire collection of Chase?s known portraits in oil. Each is gorgeously reproduced, and many are published in color for the first time. This is the second 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 was especially difficult, as no log book of sitters has been located and no other records exist for those works that were not publicly exhibited. Nevertheless, Ronald G. Pisano?s meticulous research has uncovered more than six hundred portraits in private and public collections. Among 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).

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