Chase’s school—unaffiliated with any college or museum, with relaxed admission standards that allowed acceptance of as many students, men and women, as possible—could provide the income he and Gerson needed. So it was that in the fall of 1896, Chase and a group of his more progressive students declared the methods of the Art Students League passé and seceded. A few weeks later, they opened the Chase School, offering classes in drawing and painting from life, composition, still life, and portraiture, in a series of makeshift classrooms near the famed “Ladies’ Mile District” on 23rd Street in Manhattan.
Although Chase originally planned to teach all the courses himself, he soon realized he needed help. He hired additional instructors who also sought to create art that would express an eclectic American spirit. Among them were three women who had been his students: Ami Mali Hicks, Alice M. Simpson, and Louise Lyons Heustis.
Chase set the tone for the new school in an inaugural address on October 5, 1896, telling students “I recognize no sex in art.” He asserted that “[w]omen should have an equal chance to develop their tastes” and vowed that he would “make no difference whatsoever in my instructions than if they were men.”
Contrary to the more restrictive League, the Chase School emulated the ecumenical approach to individual artistic style and liberal policies of the free-spirited Académie Julian in Paris, which prioritized instruction in a studio-based apprenticeship under the guidance of a master artist.
Chase established an open-door policy to maximize enrollment, requiring no strict prerequisites for admission; beginners worked alongside more advanced peers. He set tuition to compete with the League—eight dollars per class per month or a hundred a year to enroll full time—and determined that his school wouldn’t be governed by a board of control to avoid the kinds of conservative pressures he found so oppressive at the League.
The venture was an immediate success. First-time students enrolled by the dozens, as did some of the League’s best pupils. Chase won acclaim as a debonair and inspiring instructor, known for a generous and unconventional approach in the classroom. He used his celebrity status to place glowing reports of his students’ achievements in newspaper and magazine articles. Painter Lawton Parker, one of Chase’s favorite students and an original defector from the League, opined that the Chase School had “the strongest line of students ever brought together in New York.”