Antique

In Chase's 1888 Hide and Seek, two young girls — sisters, perhaps — play on a vast shimmering hardwood floor, in a sparely-decorated room. A mysterious painting. Who is hiding? Who is seeking? Is it just a game? Or is the painting about growing up — the older girl approaching the door to adulthood, the younger one looking at her own future?

Georgia O'Keeffe, Edward Hopper and George Bellows were very different artists, but they did have at least one thing in common: They all studied with painter William Merritt Chase. Now, the Phillips Collection in Washington, D.C., is marking the centennial of the artist's death with a retrospective.



Chase used to paint fish during the classes he taught at the New York School of Art. He would buy fish at the market, paint them quickly, and return them before they went bad.

"You walk around these galleries and the paintings are gutsy and bold and scintillating and brilliant," says Dorothy Kosinski, director of the Phillips.

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