A City Park

This is a small oil painting of a public park in New York City. Oil on canvas means paint mixed with oil and applied to a woven cloth. The picture measures about thirteen and a half inches high and nearly twenty inches wide, so it is a size you could carry under one arm. It shows a green space inside a busy city and the people who come there for leisure, including women. The paint is applied loosely, and the colors are bright and light. Notice how the scene seems to be made of quick touches of color rather than careful outlines.

William Merritt Chase, an American artist who lived from 1849 to 1916, painted this around 1887. In the late 1880s he made a series of pictures of the public parks of Brooklyn and Manhattan, and this is one of them. He admired the French Impressionists, painters who tried to capture fleeting light and everyday scenes. Following their example, he experimented with dramatic effects of space, open brushwork, which means strokes left loose and visible, and a high-keyed palette, which means bright, light colors. Because the canvas is so small, he probably painted it outdoors, carrying portable materials into the park.

New York and other American cities were growing very fast in these years. Parks offered city dwellers a place to rest and escape the crowding. They were also new kinds of places for social life, where people could meet, stroll and spend free time together in public. Chase chose this everyday modern setting as his subject, rather than a grand historical scene. Look a little longer at the brushwork across the canvas. Its loose, open strokes carry the feeling of a moment seen outdoors, and they hint at an artist standing in the park, painting what was in front of him.