The Tile Club: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting The Tile Club | Page 38

Figure 24. William Merritt Chase (American, 1849–1916),
James Abbott McNeill Whistler, 1885, oil on canvas, 74 1/8
x 36 1/4 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, bequest of
William H. Walker, 1918, 18.22.2
32 THE TILE CLUB: Camaraderie and American Plein-Air Painting
Little is known about the Tile Club’s activities as a
group in 1885, except that Laffan wrote Vedder’s wife
that they were doing “well, and had adopted a new
drink, ‘mint juleps.’” Laffan had meanwhile left Harp-
er’s to become publisher of the Sun; and several mem-
bers, in addition to Weir, had, “with total disregard for
income, become fathers of families.” 140 Meanwhile,
Millet was enjoying his home in Broadway hosting
his old companions Abbey and Parsons and their new
artist friend John Singer Sargent, made famous by his
portrait, Madam X, at the Paris Salon of the previ-
ous year. Chase spent most of the summer in nearby
London with yet another American expatriate painter,
James McNeill Whistler, where they were painting
each other’s portraits, to be exhibited together that fall
when Whistler returned home to the United States to
give a lecture tour. In fact, the Tile Club was gearing
up for a banquet to honor Whistler’s return and serve
as a “send off ” for his lecture tour, but the trip never
materialized. By the following year, Chase, tired of
waiting for Whistler to complete his portrait, which
never was finished, and presumably was destroyed,
exhibited Portrait of James Abbott McNeill Whistler
(Metropolitan Museum of Art) without its companion
piece (Whistler’s portrait of Chase) (fig. 24). 141 The
critics had a field day, mistakenly assuming Chase’s
painting was a caricature of the notorious dandy of
Cheyne Walk, Whistler never spoke to Chase aga