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Woodstock-based painter Frank Swift Chase summers in …

Years: 1920 - 1920
Woodstock-based painter Frank Swift Chase summers in 1920 on Nantucket Island, where he establishes his first art school; he will be the leading teacher of painting here for three decades.

Dubbed "the dean of Nantucket artists" by the Artists Association of Nantucket, he is largely responsible for the development of this community as a true art colony.

Born in St Louis, Missouri, on March 12, 1886, the fourth child of Grace (née Metcalfe) and Charles Denison Chase, he attended public elementary school and high school in St Louis.

Despite a mathematical mind, he had not progressed to college, instead working as an assistant in his father's laboratory at the Aluminum Company of America in Bauxite, Arkansas.

His father, an Alcoa chemist, is noted among the pioneers of experimentation with the use of nitroglycerin in mining.
 
In his early twenties, Frank traveled to New York City to join his elder brother, Edward Leigh Chase, at the Art Students League, and later followed him again to ASL's Art League School of Landscape Painting at Woodstock, where he studied under L. Birge Harrison and John F. Carlson in 1909.

The Chase brothers, both gifted artists, had been early members of the Woodstock artist's colony, whose participants worked and lived in hand-made Catskill Mountain cabins as part of Ralph Whitehead's experiment with utopian living at Byrdcliffe, the Bohemian settlement nestled in the slopes above the town.

A decade later, in 1919, Chase had been one of the founders of the Woodstock Artists' Association, along with Andrew Dasburg, Carl Eric Lindin, Henry Lee McFee, and his former teacher John Carlson.