Frank Swift Chase (Frank Swift Chase)

Frank Swift Chase

Artist.  He is remembered as a Post-Impressionist landscape painter and a founder of the Woodstock Artists Association in Woodstock, New York, and the Sarasota School of Art.  He grew up in modest comfort in Bauxite, Arkansas, where he attended public schools and while possessing mathematical skills, he did not attend college but worked as an assistant at the Aluminum Company of America (ALCOA), Bauxite, Arkansas, where his father was a geologist and chemist.  He travelled to New York City, New York to join his oldest brother, Edward Leigh Chase, at the Art Students League of New York and later to the Art League School of Landscape Painting at Woodstock, New York where he studied under artists Birge Harrison and John Fabian Carlson in 1909.  He and his brother Edward were early members of the Woodstock art colony, who worked and lived in hand-made cabins in the Catskill Mountains as a part of Ralph Whitehead’s utopian living at the nearby Byrdcliffe Arts and Crafts Colony.  In 1914 he moved to Charleston, South Carolina to teach art but soon became discouraged and returned to Woodstock.  In 1918 he painted murals for World War I expeditionary forces in France.  In 1919 he and several other artists founded the Woodstock Artists Association and the following year he travelled to Nantucket Island, Massachusetts where he established his first art school and taught 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.  In 1935 through 1936 he lived in southern California where he painted desert scenes outside of Palm Springs.  In 1940 he founded the Sarasota School of Art at Longboat Key, Florida where he taught occasionally through 1952.  During World War II he acted for a time as the Red Cross Director of Personnel for Overseas, Atlantic Region.  Suffering from emphysema, he returned to Woodstock in 1954 where he lived out the rest of his days.  He died at the age of 72. (bio by: William Bjornstad)

Born

  • March, 12, 1886
  • USA

Died

  • July, 07, 1958
  • USA

Cemetery

  • Artists Cemetery
  • USA

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