Franklin Einspruch reviews William Merritt Chase at the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, on view through January 16, 2017.

Einspruch observes: “There is also Hide and Seek (1888), in which a golden-haired girl (and good heavens, the paint handling on that hair is exceptional), ensconced in the lower left corner of the picture, peers from behind a curtain at another girl who pursues her through the wrong doorway on the other side of the room. Walter Darby Bannard used to say that you can judge a painter by how he paints an empty expanse, and the ones here shimmer. The far-off girl is nearly an abstraction, the bow on her dress a scribble. The figures playing in the void aren’t all that far off emotionally from certain de Chiricos.”