Alice

William Merritt Chase · 1892

Medium

Oil on canvas

Original size

171.8 × 125.4 cm (67 5/8 × 49 3/8 in.)

Currently held

Art Institute of Chicago

Movement

Impressionism

Alice is a luminous portrait of Chase's young daughter, painted with the relaxed confidence that made him one of America's foremost Impressionist painters. Chase studied in Munich and later absorbed the influence of the French Impressionists, developing a technique that combined vigorous, assured brushwork with a sensitivity to natural light. In Alice, that technique is on full display — the soft rendering of the child's dress, the delicate handling of skin tones, and the understated background all work together to give the portrait an intimacy that formal Victorian painting rarely achieved. Chase had a particular gift for capturing his subjects mid-thought, and Alice feels observed rather than posed. The painting is part of a series of affectionate portraits Chase made of his children throughout the 1890s, now considered among the most personal and technically accomplished works of his career. Our hand-painted oil reproduction is executed on stretched canvas using the same oil medium as the original, faithfully rendering Chase's characteristic brushwork and the warm tonal range that gives the painting its quiet emotional weight. It arrives ready to hang and is indistinguishable from a gallery piece at a fraction of the cost of a museum print.