In artist William Chase’s painting Idle Hour he depicts his family with two of his daughters appearing as part of a natural world in harmony with their surroundings. He characterizes his daughters as innocent by their dazzling white dresses as they relax on the dunes of Shinnecock, 
In artist Pablo Picasso’s Three Women at the Spring painting, he probably used the traditional Three Graces to create the subject. Picasso’s painting was a response to World War I, when French art society decided to reassure and reestablish its roots with a grand tradition and a kind of solid, reassuring, sculptural vision of the human figure rooted in classicism. Depicting a method of Picasso’s more radical artwork, the women in the painting have a tubular nature in the arms and large abstract rhythms displaying his strong Cubist abstraction and sculptural realism. Picasso chose to give his neo-Classical and monumental figures a primitive Mediterranean feel, which has originality in his artworks. The three women appear to have strong chiseled profiles and exaggerated statuesque contours reminiscent of late or provincial Hellenistic styles of artwork. The strange rotundity of the bodies is not only juxtaposed by the heavily hewed faces but by the deep gouged-in lines to denote the folds of the dresses. The accentuated width of these folds and the dramatic use of color to create them - silvery in quality, against the bright blue -add to this sense of heightened relief, contrasting with the brown ochre backdrop of the rocks. Instead of Picasso creating a rhythm to counteract the strong perpendicular lines of the chair, he uses folds to counteract in reverse, creating a heavy, angular tension.
William Chase’s painting Idle Hour and Pablo Picasso’s painting Three Women at the Spring are similar in their themes with both artworks containing female subjects situated in natural environments. Chase’s painting displays female subjects outdoors in nature, while Picasso’s female subjects are in an earth-element environment of stone and clay objects. Both artists use strong earth tone colors in their background to bring out their feminine and innocent qualities in their female subjects. The earth tone colors also help bring out the feminine flair of the subject’s garments. Chase uses earth tones in the landscape as he placed the female subjects on a backdrop of brownish-green grass to bring out their free flowing dazzling white dresses. Picasso uses earth tones to accent the fleshy upper body of the women in his painting with their silvery colored dresses, and two of the women have their dress straps hanging down their arms to expose an important nurturing characteristic of a woman, the breast. Also, Chase and Picasso’s subjects are painted enjoying a moment in time as the female subjects in Idle Hour are enjoying the sunshine and outdoors at the ocean, and the women in Three Women at the Spring are gathered intimately in conversation. The difference between the two artists is that Chase is from the 19th Century and Picasso is from the 20th Century although they are both modern artists with their own style of painting.
Chase was an exponent of the Impressionist painting movement. He painted with relatively small, thin, yet visible brush strokes, used open composition and put emphasis on accuracy in depiction of light in its changing qualities to accentuate the effects of the passage of time. He also used common ordinary subject matter, and usually the subjects would be himself, his wife Alice and their children or a combination of both. Picasso is widely known for co-founding the Cubist movement of France
William Chase was an American painter and Pablo Picasso was a Spanish painter. However, both artists studied art in Europe and under the instruction of French artists. Although Chase studied at the National Academy of Design in New York under an instructor named Lemuel Wilmarth a student of the famous French artist Jean-Leon Gerome and Picasso spent most of his adult life in France, their methods of painting have their roots in the French art movements. Chase’s French roots can be found in his en plein air technique of outdoors painting, and Picasso in his Cubist artworks.
The female gender subjects in Chase and Picasso’s paintings throw aside the traditions of Impressionist art, which was the foundation of Modern Art. In Chase and Picasso’s artwork, the female subjects are not catching the male gaze or painted as sex objects. Instead, they are depicted in their natural feminine state enjoying a domestic moment in time. Even the earth tones used by both artists in their painting bring out natural qualities of the feminine gender bodies and actions. Chase uses his earth tones to bring out female subjects enjoying their natural world environment outdoors, and Picasso uses earth tones to situate his women in a natural earth element environment enjoying intimate conversation. These forms of feminist depiction would not have been considered conventional during the Impressionist movement where male artists and male subjects were considered the norm in art. Still Chase and Picasso are famous and respected artists in art’s history and present day.
Hunter, Sam. Modern Art. The Vendome Press, New York
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