The American artist most dear to me is the impressionist William Merritt Chase (1849-1916). Chase painted plein air scenes in Brooklyn's Prospect Park and Coney Island and also produced a truly wonderful series of landscapes set in the south fork of eastern Long Island. I knew nothing of these Shinnecock paintings nor of Chase himself until one day in 1987 when I happened upon an exhibition of his work in the National Gallery in Washington. Even though I was much taken with the paintings, I was too frugal to buy the catalog. By virtue of Amazon, I've at last located a copy (D. Scott Atkinson and Nicolai Cikovsky, Jr, "William Merritt Chase, Summers at Shinnecock 1891-1902 [Washington: National Gallery, 1987]).
In "At the Seaside" (1892), a group of women and children enjoy a lazy day on an otherwise empty beach. In the distance to the left is a sailboat and to the right, almost at the horizon, a sandy point. The costumes are of the 1890s, but the sea and the surf and the clouds are timeless. It's a busy but very peaceful scene. Similar Chase landcapes depict sea-grasses, scrubby trees, sandy beaches, empty roads. Many of his canvasses are populated by his wife and children.
Fully as idyllic as Chase's "Summers at Shinnecock" were my own Wordsworthian "Summers at Makamah Beach, 1947-1949." Although Makamah was on the Sound (on the north shore), it was as like as like could be to Shinnecock in the 1890s. My family spent three magical summers there -- the best summers and by far the best times of my otherwise entirely citified, asphalt childhood. We rented a very simple wood-frame beach house. If my memory is correct, the house was mostly deck with a minimal kitchen and a few sleeping rooms. It seemed like a great distance to the nearest neighboring beach house, but, in retrospect, it was probably no more than five hundred or at most a thousand feet. But to a kid from the schoolyard, a thousand feet was more than plenty. I loved the emptiness -- no trolleys, no radios, no people. I remember wandering alone for hours at low tide examining, with the patience of childhood, the crabs, snails, seaweeds and the infinite variety of dead fish. To my vocabulary, I added such novelties as inlet, point, cove, high tide, squall, blowfish, starfish, perch, sea urchin, shiner, sinker, fiddler crab, hermit crab, razorback, softshell, float, outboard and inboard, "sheared a pin," oarlock, dinghy -- words and concepts previously beyond the outer limit of my imagination. There were porpoises almost every day -- once I was all alone on the beach when two of them battled furiously for several minutes right in front of my astonished eyes. No one else saw them, and no one believed me. There was also an abundance of horseshoe crabs-- not crabs at all, as I later discovered, but trilobites left over from the Paleozoic. I think it was the horseshoes that started me reading about paleontology. I remember also old Mr. van Etten, already more than a child when Chase was painting at Shinnecock, who took me out in his rowboat to trawl for bluefish.
Wordsworth wrote about his childhood's "fair seed-time" and that he was "fostered alike by beauty and by fear." While it's easy to exaggerate the amount of fear back in 1950s Brooklyn, it's a fact that there was an almost absolute absence of beauty. Makamah Beach offered not only beauty and variety but also the possibility of different kind of life.
Very interesting blog. My father, Robert, was the third youngest of eight children, 6 girls and 2 boys of William Merritt Chase, my grandfather. Oddly enough, my husband and I raised our children in Northport not far from Makamah Beach. Our boys played there many times over the summers. It truly was a wonderful place.
Posted by: Carol Chase Spera | August 05, 2006 at 11:25 AM