The Fairy Tale, William Merritt Chase, 1892

Each summer for eleven years, beginning in 1891, William Merritt Chase taught classes in outdoor painting at Shinnecock, on the eastern end of Long Island near the village of Southampton. During those summers Chase and his family lived in a large, comfortable house in the starkly beautiful Shinnecock hills.  There Chase made many of his best and most beautiful paintings, most of which were located within the house and studio or in the landscape closely surrounding it.

These paintings depict his wife and children enjoying the sun's warmth and cooling sea breezes, and engaged in the pastimes of summer, gathering flowers in the fields and shells on the beach, reading, strolling, exploring.  The mood is inescapably idyllic.  In The Fairy Tale, even the title evokes the painting's magical, enchanted ideality.

“Life is very short... but I would like to live four times and if I could, I would set out to do no other things than I am seeking now to do.”  ~William Merritt Chase

National Gallery of Art