Jessie K. Chase (1879-1970) American, Oil on Paper Cityscape. Signed in pen bottom right. Titled in pen bottom left: "The Hill - Madison." 

Depicts the city of Madison, Wisconsin from a high vantage point within a dense forest clearing. No glass in the walnut frame.

Condition: Spots throughout. Signs of repair on verso. 

Overall Size: 15 x 18 in. 

Sight Size: 6 1/2 x 8 in. 

Jessie Kalmbach Chase was born on November 22nd, 1879, in Baileys Harbor, Wisconsin. She studied design and graduated from the Art Institute of Chicago in 1901 before becoming a stained glass window designer for an art glass company in Chicago. She would often prepare watercolor paintings to demonstrate the design before producing a window, which later led her to work in oils to create more thorough landscapes. She would spend time studying a scene in person before returning to her home studio to create the paintings, often saying in interviews that she did not want to simply copy nature but to explore specific light situations, as well as avoid mosquitoes. In the late 1900s she married Wilfred Chase and moved with him to Madison, Wisconsin. From the 1920s on she was a member of the Madison Art Guild, exhibiting works annually all around the town. Her work was also distributed through the Madison Art Association to galleries statewide, such as for an exhibit at the Sawyer Foundation in Oshkosh in 1926 and at the Milwaukee Journal’s Gallery of Wisconsin Art in 1929. After the start of the Great Depression she was employed by the Works Progress Administration’s Public Works of Art Project, creating murals for the Madison Public Library and the Bank of Sturgeon Bay. For some of the larger pieces Chase worked in a mixture of cement and oil paint to create “cement-frescoes” that still stand, including the entrance to Madison West High School and some civic structures in Fort Atkinson. By the late 1930s she was having individual exhibitions at museums across the state as her body of work grew, but in the post-War years she shunned publicity, particularly after the death of her husband in 1949. She retreated to her hometown, living on the outskirts of Baileys Harbor and painting hundreds of solitary landscapes that captured the stark and beautiful areas around Lake Michigan, particularly Door County. She began experimenting in serigraphy and sold prints of her works through local gift shops and out of her home studio throughout the 1960s. She died in October of 1970 in Green Bay and is still remembered as one of the most pivotal female artists in the state’s history. Her work is on permanent display at the Miller Art Museum in Sturgeon Bay, with two of her murals restored and relocated to the Door County Library in a wing named in her honor in 2010. 

Spots throughout. Signs of repair on verso.