William Chadwick   (American, 1879-1962) 

William Chadwick immigrated to the United States in 1884 when the artist’s family left their home in England to settle in Holyoke, Massachusetts – a locale made famous by Thomas Cole’s “View from Mount Holyoke.” Although Chadwick was raised in an area where the style of the Hudson River School thrived, he pushed beyond the landscape views of this earlier tradition to create works in the Impressionist style. Influenced by Joseph DeCamp and John Twatchman at The Art Students League in New York, Chadwick quickly adopted the energetic brushstrokes and intimate scenes associated with American Impressionism. Following his studies at various institutions including the Boston Museum School of Art, Chadwick spent a number of years traveling to different locations within New England and Europe, including a three year sojourn to Italy from 1912-1915. Upon his return from Italy, the artist and his family settled in Old Lyme, Connecticut – an area with which Chadwick was familiar given his previous participation in the Old Lyme artists’ colony. Chadwick spent the rest of his life in Old Lyme, devoting himself to the creation of Impressionists works that studied the en plein air effects of light and color. Some of the artist’s finest canvases often signal the influence of both French and American Impressionism in their attention to atmospheric effects and the representation of quiet, personal scenes depicting individuals lost in reverie. Chadwick’s paintings are in the collection of many New England museums, including the Mattatuck Museum of the Mattatuck Historical Society and the Florence Griswold Museum in Connecticut, as well as the George Walter Vincent Smith Museum in Massachusetts and the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, DC.