Frank Swift Chase

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Frank Swift Chase (March 12, 1886 – July 3, 1958) was an American landscape painter in the Post-Impressionist style. He helped start several key art communities, including the Woodstock Artists Association in Woodstock, New York (founded 1919), a Nantucket, Massachusetts art colony where he taught for about 30 years starting in 1920, and the Sarasota School of Art in Longboat Key, Florida (founded 1940).

Chase was born in St. Louis, Missouri, the fourth child of Grace Metcalfe and Charles Denison Chase. After public schooling in St. Louis, he worked in his father's lab at the Aluminum Company of America in Bauxite, Arkansas. In his twenties he moved to New York City to join his older brother Edward Leigh Chase at the Art Students League, and later studied landscape painting at Woodstock under L. Birge Harrison and John F. Carlson in 1909.

As a painter, Chase favored landscape subjects and moved from American Impressionism toward a Post-Impressionist view of nature. He became known for his outdoor painting and his northern romantic style, while also echoing the Hudson River School in his later work. He traveled around the United States, including a two-year period (1935–1936) painting desert scenes near Palm Springs, California.

Back in Woodstock, he taught and mentored many artists and helped develop the Nantucket art community, supporting organizations like the Nantucket Artists Association. His students and colleagues contributed to his lasting influence on American regional art.

Frank Swift Chase died on July 3, 1958, at Benedictine Hospital in Kingston, New York, and is buried in Woodstock’s Artists Cemetery. His brother Edward Leigh Chase is the grandfather of actor Chevy Chase.