The Bayberry Bush (Chase Homestead in Shinnecock Hills)

The paintings that William Merritt Chase made when teaching at the Shinnecock Hills Summer School of Art are inevitably associated with Gilded Age leisure, even more so as nineteenth-century Shingle Style architecture, which appears in some of those works, has become the signature of fin-de-twentieth-siècle trophy beach houses. Chase, who knew the importance of keeping current with prevailing tastes in artistic as well as social circles, has here made the house, a perquisite of his seasonal teaching position, a key element in the painting and transformed a prosaic depiction of his three daughters in the sandy scrub of the Shinnecock Hills into pictorial gold.