William Merritt Chase said that he expected to be remembered as a painter of fish. He often painted small fish still lifes as class demonstrations – literally performance pieces. The fish paintings offer a vision of modernity built by an influential American artist and teacher upon the foundation of European old master painting. Austere, dark, and exquisitely brushed, the large versions were once among the “must have” contemporary paintings for American public art museums. But later, Chase’s fish sank almost completely out of sight. Only now coming back into fashion, these paintings have much to tell us about changing tastes, the art market during and after Chase’s lifetime, and some of the ways in which modernist painters have incorporated the artistic, cultural, and economic past in their work.