I took my own Biographical Sketch of Harry Chase and asked ChatGPT to rewrite it in the style of HP Lovecraft, this was the result:

“Pa, I Want to Go to Europe!”

A Lost Light of the Gilded Age

There are men whose names, once spoken in the drawing rooms and galleries of their age, seemed destined to endure as monuments; men whose portraits hung in the houses of the powerful, whose canvases were eagerly sought by collectors, and whose triumphs were chronicled in the newspapers of great cities. Yet time possesses strange appetites, and there are reputations which, despite every promise of immortality, gradually sink into that dim region where even the most diligent historian must grope among fragments.

Harry Chase was one such man.

In the latter years of the nineteenth century, when America was swelling with wealth and ambition and the Eastern Establishment looked increasingly toward Europe for the refinements of culture, Harry Chase occupied a position of no small distinction among the artists of his generation. His paintings, particularly those of the sea and the distant coasts of Europe, were sought by wealthy patrons and exhibited in the most important halls of the American art world. He had studied beneath celebrated masters in Munich, Paris, and The Hague; his work had been accepted by the august Salon de Paris; and honors had come to him with a rapidity that might have seemed almost unnatural in so young a man.

He was, in short, precisely the sort of artist whom posterity ought to remember.

And yet posterity forgot him.

What remains is his work: a considerable body of paintings, many of them alive with the restless waters of northern seas, the masts and rigging of vessels, the pallid skies of foreign shores, and that peculiar atmosphere which belongs to the ocean when seen by a man who has gazed upon it too long.

For there was something in Harry Chase's relationship with the sea that seems, in retrospect, almost prophetic.

He was born Henry Seymour Chase Jr. on February 2, 1853, in Woodstock, Vermont, the son of Dr. Henry Seymour Chase Sr. and Sally Haskell. The family belonged to an old tradition of healing. His father, grandfather, great-grandfather, and great-great-grandfather had all been physicians, while his father possessed the additional distinction of being both an M.D. and a D.D.S. It might therefore have been expected that Harry would follow his brothers into the respectable domains of medicine and science.

But even in childhood there were indications that another summons had reached him.

The boy was called Harry by family and friends, a name he would retain throughout his professional life. In 1857, when he was only four years old, the family moved westward to Iowa, where his father became a gentleman farmer and frontier dentist. There, amid the broad spaces and comparatively primitive surroundings of the American frontier, Harry discovered the peculiar fascination of pictures.

He copied illustrations from Harper's Weekly, practicing whenever opportunity permitted, and from time to time received formal lessons in drawing. It was an innocent occupation, or so it appeared. Yet the boy's devotion to it was persistent, and as the years passed it became increasingly clear that the artistic impulse within him was not a passing childish fancy.

By adolescence he was receiving formal education at the University of Iowa in Iowa City.

Then came St. Louis.

In 1868 the family moved there after Dr. Chase accepted the chair of operative dentistry at the Missouri Dental College. The city into which Harry entered was one of vigorous growth, but its artistic world remained small enough that an ambitious young man could readily discover its hidden chambers. Around Fifth and Olive Streets, in the district that would one day lie beneath the shadow of the Gateway Arch, artists gathered in their studios and struggled to make a living from paint and canvas.

Harry haunted that district.

There he encountered men who would become significant figures in American art: John M. Tracy, William Lewis Marple, James William Pattison, J. R. Meeker, Alban Jasper Conant, Thomas Allen Jr., Paul E. Harney, and William Merritt Chase.

The community was small, the resources limited, and there was no proper art academy in the city. Yet Harry found a master in James Reeve Stuart, a portrait painter and displaced Southern aristocrat whose own education had carried him to Munich before the Civil War. From Stuart, the young Chase heard of a place that seemed almost mythical in its distance and promise: Munich, Germany, and the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts.

To Harry, Munich became more than a city.

It became an obsession.

The Academy

In 1870, at seventeen years of age, Harry left St. Louis for New York and spent a year studying at the National Academy of Design. His instructor was Lemuel Wilmarth, himself a former classmate of Stuart's in Munich.

Once again, the same name arose.

Munich.

The Royal Bavarian Academy.

Europe.

The stories of the old masters and the great European schools worked upon Harry's imagination with increasing force. By the time he returned to St. Louis in 1871, ordinary education no longer satisfied him. He had made his decision.

He would become an artist.

Not merely an artist, but an artist educated in Europe.

And so, in a moment that would become one of the most memorable declarations of his short life, he confronted his father with the words:

“Pa, I want to go to Europe!”

His father eventually relented.

In July of 1872, when Harry was only nineteen, he crossed the Atlantic with another young St. Louis artist, William Merritt Chase. The coincidence of their surname has led some to suppose a family connection, but there was none. Their relationship was one not of blood, but of art.

They were brothers only in the dangerous fraternity of young men who have abandoned the safe paths expected of them in pursuit of something that cannot be measured.

Munich awaited.

At the Royal Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts, Harry received an education of remarkable breadth. Among his instructors were Wilhelm von Kaulbach, director of the Academy; Wilhelm von Lindenschmit; Arthur von Ramberg; Ferdinand Barth; and Konstantinos Volanakis, the celebrated Greek painter of marine subjects.

For nearly four years, Harry immersed himself in his studies.

And beyond the Academy lay Europe itself.

He traveled through Germany and across the British Isles, visited Scandinavia, Venice, Belgium, and the Netherlands, and everywhere he went he studied the coasts and the ships that haunted them.

There is something particularly appropriate in this.

The young American had crossed an ocean to find his artistic education, and wherever he traveled thereafter he returned again and again to the ocean.

The sea became his subject.

Perhaps it had already become something more.

The First Triumph

In early 1876, Harry returned to America bearing a great cache of paintings and studies from his European travels. He established a studio briefly in New York, but by the summer he had returned to St. Louis and taken a studio at Fifth and Olive.

He was determined to make both a name and a fortune.

By November, the opportunity came.

At Pettes & Leathe, a prominent local gallery at 606 and 608 Washington, Harry arranged an enormous one-man exhibition consisting of forty paintings. The subjects were exotic to American eyes: foreign coastlines, unfamiliar harbors, sailing vessels, and scenes gathered from the distant lands through which the young artist had traveled.

The exhibition drew crowds.

Daily, visitors came to stand before Harry's canvases and gaze upon worlds that most of them would never see.

When the exhibition closed on November 21, 1876, the paintings were auctioned.

Every single work sold.

Harry received approximately $1,600—a considerable sum, equivalent to roughly $32,000 in 2017 currency.

The effect upon St. Louis was immediate.

Harry Chase had arrived.

Pettes & Leathe recognized that they possessed something valuable in the young artist, and offered to finance another European journey should he agree to return abroad and paint.

Harry accepted.

His destination this time was Paris.

But before he departed, there was one more matter to settle.

Emma

On January 23, 1877, Harry married his childhood sweetheart, Laura Emeline Eames.

She was a young woman from one of St. Louis's best social circles, the daughter of Dr. William Henry Eames, a dentist and colleague of Harry's father. Family and friends called her Emma.

She possessed artistic ambitions of her own.

She wished to become an authoress.

On the very evening of their wedding, the newlyweds departed St. Louis for New York to board the steamship that would carry them back across the Atlantic.

They were young—very young.

Harry was twenty-four when his birthday arrived during the voyage, while Emma turned twenty-one soon after their arrival in Europe.

For the next three years, husband and wife would live the life of expatriate artists and dreamers.

And Europe, which Harry had once imagined as a distant realm of artistic enlightenment, would become the setting for both his greatest triumphs and the beginnings of a darker destiny.

Paris

In 1877 and 1878, Harry and Emma lived in the Latin Quarter of Paris.

Their existence there had the quality of a romantic fiction: the young American painter, the aspiring authoress, the narrow streets, the studios, the cafés, and the ancient city surrounding them with its innumerable ghosts of artists and writers.

Harry sought out Paul Constant Soyer as his master.

Soyer was a respected French artist whose influence had already helped launch the career of Mary Cassatt. Under Soyer's instruction, Harry continued to refine the techniques that would establish his reputation.

But technical mastery was not enough.

Harry understood that an American artist seeking recognition in his era had to pass through one particular gateway.

The Salon de Paris.

To be accepted by its jury was to receive the blessing of the artistic establishment itself.

In 1878, Harry succeeded.

One of his works was selected for the Salon.

The event was reported throughout the American press, and the obscure young painter from St. Louis suddenly found his name appearing before prospective patrons across the United States.

That same year he exhibited at the Annual Exhibition of the National Academy of Design in New York.

The path seemed open before him.

But Paris was not to be his final European home.

By 1879, Harry and Emma had departed for The Hague.

The Hague

There, in the Netherlands, Harry found another master: Hendrik Willem Mesdag, the celebrated marine painter.

For nearly a year Harry studied under Mesdag and became acquainted with the artists of the Hague School, the loose confederacy of Dutch Impressionists whose work was transforming the visual language of the northern European landscape.

They accepted him.

Harry, the young American, had become one of their own.

Their influence would remain with him for the rest of his life.

His paintings increasingly carried the unmistakable atmosphere of Dutch Impressionism: sea and sky, ships and harbors, gray light, shifting weather, and the strange melancholy of coastlines where land and water seem perpetually to dispute possession.

Once again, Harry's work found favor at the Salon de Paris.

In 1879 another painting was accepted.

His reputation grew.

Yet the years were passing.

And the young painter was beginning to acquire something more substantial than reputation.

He was becoming wealthy.

Harry Chase Mania

In October 1879, after almost three years abroad, Harry and Emma returned to St. Louis.

Harry had not wasted his time.

During his European travels he had produced eighty-three paintings, all shipped back to St. Louis under the care of Pettes & Leathe, where they were displayed and sold.

By the time the Chases arrived home, St. Louis had fallen once more into what might almost be called a fever.

There was, as the newspapers and patrons seemed to understand it, a “Harry Chase Mania.”

Pettes & Leathe prepared a second one-man exhibition.

Sixty-four works were shown in March of 1880.

Again the response was extraordinary.

The auction produced between $6,000 and $7,000 in cash—approximately $120,000 to $140,000 in 2017 dollars.

Harry and Emma were no longer struggling young artists.

They had money.

They had reputation.

They had patrons.

And now they possessed the means to establish themselves where the highest levels of American art were concentrated.

They moved east.

The Sea

From 1880 to 1881, the Chases lived in New Bedford, Massachusetts.

The choice was practical.

New Bedford provided Harry with immediate access to the ships, shores, and sea that had become so central to his art.

There their first child, Rhoda Campbell Chase, was born.

Harry's success continued. His paintings were exhibited widely, commissions arrived with increasing regularity, and his financial position became steadily more secure.

With his new prosperity, he purchased a yacht.

The vessel was called Bonnie.

Harry joined the New Bedford Yacht Club and began to spend his summers upon the water.

There is an unsettling symmetry in the fact that the artist who had made his reputation painting the sea should eventually possess a vessel from which to study it at leisure.

From the deck of the Bonnie, he could watch the changing skies, the vessels, the currents, and the distant horizons.

The sea that had carried him to Europe was now his private studio.

And the sea, indifferent to human ambition, waited.

New York

By 1881 Harry had established a studio in New York City.

His career now accelerated with astonishing speed.

The National Academy of Design welcomed his work.

So did the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, the Society of American Artists, the Boston Art Club, the Philadelphia Society of Artists, the Salmagundi Sketch Club, and the American Water Color Society.

Harry became a member of many of these organizations.

His paintings appeared wherever an important exhibition was held.

Yet he continued to return to New Bedford during the summers, where the Bonnie awaited him and the sea supplied an endless succession of subjects.

He was no longer the obscure boy copying pictures from Harper's Weekly.

He had become one of the recognized artists of American society.

And recognition brought honors.

Honors

In 1883, shortly before the birth of his son, Irwin G. Chase, Harry was elected an Associate National Academician of the National Academy of Design.

In 1885 came a greater distinction.

His painting New York Harbor, North River won the First Hallgarten Prize for the best painting by an American artist under the age of thirty-five at the annual exhibition of the National Academy of Design.

Harry was thirty-two.

That same year he was elected Vice President of the Salmagundi Sketch Club.

His reputation was impeccable.

His paintings were sought by wealthy collectors and seemed to sell almost as quickly as they could be removed from his easel. Among his patrons were Vanderlip, Billings, Layton, and Laughlin—men who belonged to the powerful elite of American society.

Whatever romantic notions existed concerning the starving artist, Harry Chase did not fit them.

He had achieved precisely what the ambitious young artist dreams of achieving.

Money.

Recognition.

Prestige.

A family.

A future.

Then, with a suddenness that would have been difficult to imagine even in the darkest fiction, the future began to dissolve.

The Unwelcome Darkness

During the autumn of 1885, Harry returned to New York after a journey northward into New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, undertaken in search of artistic material.

He returned ill.

For many months he had suffered from severe indigestion.

But now there was something else.

Something he could not explain.

His mind began to betray him.

Visions came.

Delusions gathered.

The world around him, once the source of artistic inspiration, increasingly seemed distorted by forces that reason could not master.

By the end of the year his condition had become so severe that his family committed him to the Hudson River State Hospital for the Insane at Poughkeepsie, New York.

The young artist who had conquered Munich, Paris, The Hague, and New York now found himself confined within an institution.

The prizes remained.

The paintings remained.

The reputation remained.

But Harry himself was slipping away.

For a year he remained at Poughkeepsie.

Treatment brought no apparent cure.

And in this, perhaps, lies the cruelest irony of his story: the man who had spent his life traveling in search of beauty could find no physician capable of guiding him back from the country into which his own mind had carried him.

By the end of 1886, his family removed him from the hospital and took him southward, into the mountains of Tennessee.

There, strangely, he was placed under the care of a man who apparently possessed no formal medical training.

For brief intervals, hope returned.

Harry improved.

Perhaps the nightmare was ending.

Perhaps the mind that had once conceived so many luminous paintings might yet be restored.

But the improvement never lasted.

Again and again the darkness returned.

Again and again Harry descended.

The years passed.

Nearly four years of illness had consumed the life of a man who, only a few years earlier, had seemed destined for a brilliant and enduring career.

On October 1, 1889, in Sewanee, Tennessee, Henry Seymour Chase Jr. died.

He was thirty-six years old.

He left behind a wife and two small children.

His body was eventually laid to rest in Bellefontaine Cemetery in St. Louis, the city where his artistic ambitions had first taken shape.

And so Harry Chase was gone.

The Forgotten Painter

What might Harry Chase have become had he lived?

That question cannot be answered.

Perhaps his reputation would have grown until his name stood among the great American painters of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps changing fashions would have diminished his fame.

Perhaps his work, like so much of the art of his generation, would have slipped quietly into obscurity regardless of how long he lived.

We cannot know.

But his paintings remain.

They are the surviving fragments of a life that burned with remarkable intensity for scarcely more than three decades.

They preserve the shores he saw, the vessels he studied, the waters he crossed, and the skies beneath which he worked.

There is something haunting in this.

For Harry Chase had spent his life pursuing distant horizons.

As a boy, he looked westward from Iowa and dreamed through the pages of Harper's Weekly. As a young man in St. Louis, he heard of Munich and imagined the great European academies. He crossed the Atlantic and wandered through Germany, Britain, Scandinavia, Venice, Belgium, France, and the Netherlands. He studied beneath masters. He entered the Salon de Paris. He returned to America triumphant. He became wealthy. He acquired a yacht. He won prizes. He entered the highest circles of American art.

And then, almost without warning, the horizon vanished.

The artist who had painted the sea could no longer escape the storms within himself.

There is a particular sadness in the fate of such a man—not merely because he died young, but because the evidence of what he might have become survives in abundance.

His canvases tell us that the promise was real.

His honors tell us that his contemporaries recognized it.

His patrons tell us that his work possessed value.

And his premature death tells us that all of these things were insufficient protection against the obscure forces that can descend upon a human mind.

Harry Chase's light was brief.

But it was not dim.

For a few extraordinary years, his paintings shone brightly enough to illuminate the artistic world around him.

Then the light went out.

And for more than a century, the name of Harry Chase remained in the shadows—waiting, as though patiently beneath the dust of forgotten galleries and neglected histories, for someone to open the door again.

When that door is opened, the old paintings are still there.

The ships still sail.

The gray waters still move beneath the northern skies.

And somewhere beyond those painted horizons lies the Europe for which a young artist once pleaded with his father:

“Pa, I want to go to Europe!”

He went.

He saw what he had dreamed of seeing.

He returned victorious.

And then, before his life had truly begun, he vanished into the darkness.