Portrait of Artist Beck Wenzell

William Merritt Chase's 1900 portrait of the artist Beck Wenzell belongs to his series of painter portraits in which professional sympathy and mutual technical knowledge shape the characterization. Chase was the dominant figure of American academic Impressionism and a teacher whose influence spread through the Art Students League in New York and his own summer schools. Wenzell was a fellow American painter and illustrator, and Chase's portrait of him reflects the collegial social world of the New York art scene at the turn of the century. The New Britain Museum holds this within a collection that documents the circle of American painters around Chase and the Connecticut art world.

Chase's virtuosic brushwork — broader and more assertive than his most delicate society portraits — is appropriate for a fellow painter who could appreciate technical facility. The portrait builds the sitter's face and bearing through confident, loaded strokes that emphasize Chase's characteristic direct, optically honest approach to the people he painted.