Frank Swift Chase - Teacher and Founder

Teacher and Founder

A decade later, in 1919, Chase was one of the founders of the Woodstock Artists’ Association, along with Andrew Dasburg, Carl Eric Lindin, Henry Lee McFee, and his former teacher John Carlson. The following year he summered on Nantucket Island, where he established his first art school. From 1920 onward, Chase was the leading teacher of painting there for three decades. Dubbed “the dean of Nantucket artists” by the Artists Association of Nantucket, he was largely responsible for the development of that community as a true art colony. Among Chase’s most important legacies were his students, including many who became renowned painters themselves: Elizabeth Saltonstall, Isabelle Hollister Tuttle, Ruth Haviland Sutton, Emily Hoffmeier and Anne Ramsdell Congdon. Chase encouraged open-air painting classes, weather permitting, otherwise utilizing wharf cottages along the waterfront, reminiscent of his own tutelage back in the mountain shanties of Woodstock. He helped to establish and nurture the Nantucket Artists Association, along with other influential local artists like Pat Gardner, Sybil Goldsmith, Philip Burnham Hicken, Edgar Jenney, C. Robert Perrin and Tony Sarg.

Although based in Manhattan, Woodstock and Nantucket, Chase traveled around The United States. He spent a two-year stint in southern California during 1935 and 1936, painting the desert outside Palm Springs. In 1940, he founded the Sarasota School of Art at Longboat Key, Florida, where he taught periodically through 1952. Back in Woodstock, he taught and helped to promote such future notables as Harvey Fite, Anton Refregier and Marko Vukovic.