William Merritt Chase (American 1849 – 1916) was an impressionist painter and teacher. Along with Robert Henri, who became a rival instructor, Chase was the most important teacher of American artists around the turn of the 20th century. 

Chase studied with Lemuel Wilmarth and history painters Karl Theodor von Piloty and Alexander von Wagner.

Chase founded the Chase School of Art in New York in 1896 which later became the Parsons School of Design. He also opened a studio in New York in the Tenth Street Studio Building, home to many important painters of the day, including Winslow Homer, Walter Shirlaw, John La Farge and Hudson River School artists Martin Johnson Heade, Albert Bierstadt, and Frederic Edwin Church. Kahlil Gibran lived on the third story of the building for 20 years.

Chase’s students include Georgia O’Keeffe, George Bellows, Howard Chandler Christy,   Adele Goodman Clark and Theodore Earl Butler (Theodore Butler is a distant relative of Meryl Ann Butler. He was a close friend of Claude Monet, and married Monet’s stepdaughter and favorite model, Suzanne Hoschedé.)

Meryl Ann Butler studied with Harold Stevenson, 

who studied with Louis Bouche, 

who studied with Dimitri Romanovsky, 

who studied with William Merritt Chase.