Self-portrait dressed as Johan Claesz Loo by Frans Hals

William Merritt Chase was one of the most sophisticated American painters of his generation, deeply versed in Old Master techniques acquired during his Munich training. This 1903 self-portrait in the costume of Johan Claesz Loo — a seventeenth-century Dutch painter known for his elegant portraits — and attributed specifically to a Frans Hals treatment reveals Chase engaging in artistic ventriloquism: inhabiting the persona of a Dutch Old Master as a display of his own technical mastery. Such costume self-portraits were a form of homage and artistic self-assertion common among painters who wished to proclaim their connection to the Western tradition. The work is at the Heckscher Museum of Art.

Chase adopts the loose, bravura handling associated with Frans Hals — broad, rapid strokes, a confident impasto surface, a palette of warm ochres and cool greys that reads as deliberately seventeenth-century in spirit. The lace collar and period costume are rendered with studied spontaneity that reveals Chase's considerable technical skill.