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Arab Smoking a Pipe

Arab Smoking a Pipe

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William Merritt Chase

William Merritt Chase began painting Moorish or Arab subjects while he was a student at the Royal Academy in Munich. He made several trips to Spain in the summers of 1881, 1882, and 1883. This small painting was likely a spontaneous sketch made during his 1882 trip to Spain with fellow artist Robert Frederick Blum. It represents an Arab man smoking a traditional opium pipe. The man’s dark shadow and bright clothing enhance the exoticism, or “otherness,” of the subject that Chase endeavored to convey. Such Orientalist images in paintings by Chase and other European and American artists informed stereotypes about people of Arab descent.
Artist
William Merritt Chase
(American, 1849 – 1916)
Title
Arab Smoking a Pipe
Date
ca. 1882
Medium
Oil on board
Dimensions
12 1/2 x 5 3/8 in. image
Credit
Gift of D. Frederick Baker from the Baker/Pisano Collection in memory of Robin Stuart Chase
Accession No.
2022.34.12
Classification
Paintings
Geography
United States

Related

Avery Galleries collection (Bryn Mawr, PA); 2016, gifted by Robin Chase (Flushing, NY) to D. Frederick Baker (New York, NY); August 2022, gifted to the Chazen Museum of Art

  • Pisano, Ronald G., D. Frederick Baker, Carolyn K. Lane. "William Merritt Chase: Still Lifes, Interiors, Figures, Copies of Old Masters, and Drawings. Vol. 4 of The Complete Catalogue of Known and Documented Work by William Merritt Chase (1849-1916)." New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2010. p. 139, cat. no. F.18

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