Gray Day on the Bay

William Merritt Chase was the most influential American art teacher of his generation, presiding over the Shinnecock Summer School of Art and coaching a generation of American Impressionists. This small marine study belongs to the 1880s, when Chase was consolidating the free brushwork absorbed in Munich into a lighter, plein-air manner. Its modest scale reflects his conviction that the sketch was a finished statement in its own right, a doctrine he carried into classrooms from New York to California and one that helped shape tonal landscape painting in America.