William M. Chase, N. A. by John Singer Sargent

John Singer Sargent painted this portrait of his fellow American artist William Merritt Chase in 1902, not for a commission from Chase himself, but at the request of Chase's own students. The painting hangs in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, a gift from those students in 1905.

Sargent dissolves everything into darkness except the essentials: a white collar, a palette glinting in shadow, and a face that confronts the viewer without apology. Chase's trademark drooping mustache is rendered in a handful of loose, almost reckless strokes. His eyes do most of the work, one painter assessing another, or perhaps assessing us.

The circumstances were unusual. A group of young painters pooled their resources to have the era's most celebrated portraitist capture their mentor. Sargent, then in his mid-forties, had already painted presidents, industrialists, and the scandalous Madame X. Accepting a commission from students to paint a fellow artist signaled a different kind of project, a portrait made inside the tribe, from one working painter to another.

Chase was sixty-two when he sat for this, a decade older than Sargent. He had built the Chase School of Art and taught a generation of American painters. The initials "N. A." after his name, included in the painting's formal title, mark his election as a National Academician, a status his students wanted permanently recorded. They succeeded.