Willard LeRoy Metcalf (1858-1925)
Willard Leroy Metcalf was known in his lifetime as the “poet laureate of the New England hills.” (1) He was one of the finest painters of the first generation of American Impressionists––a colleague and close friend to Childe Hassam, Theodore Robinson, and John Henry Twachtman. Metcalf built his solid reputation upon painting the landscape of Manchester, Massachusetts; Old Lyme, Connecticut; Cornish, New Hampshire; Chester, Vermont; and the Damariscotta River region of Maine.
Born in 1858 in Lowell, Massachusetts, Metcalf studied art privately with landscapist George Loring Brown and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, where his teacher was Otto Grundmann, Metcalf traveled to Paris in the summer of 1883 to continue his education at the Académie Julian. It was at this time that he befriended Twachtman, who was also studying at Julian’s. Metcalf was profoundly influenced by the work of the French artist Jules Bastien-Lepage, whose plein-air scenes were painted with a cool, silvery tonality.
In October 1884, Metcalf visited Grèz-sur-Loing for the first time. Located on the edge of the Forest of Fontainebleau, Grèz was an artist’s colony associated with the Barbizon School of painting. French and American artists gathered there and executed plein-air landscapes in softly modulated colors. Metcalf visited Grèz from Paris periodically between 1884 and 1886.
In the latter year Metcalf visited the Normandy village of Giverny, where Claude Monet had settled three years previously and begun to construct his famous garden. After a trip to Biskra, Algeria lasting several months, Metcalf again was at Giverny in 1887, a visit that is documented by The Ten Cent Breakfast (Denver Art Museum), a dark interior view featuring his friends Robinson and Twachtman and the writer Robert Louis Stevenson, components of which may have been sketched at Grèz but which nonetheless was completed at Giverny according to Metcalf’s inscription on the back, “Giverny 1887.” In this village, which filled up with Impressionist artists, a number of things came together in Metcalf’s art; his palette brightened and he abandoned his earlier tonal handling of light to explore contrasts of bright sunlight and shadow. As far as content is concerned, after 1887 Metcalf renounced any suggestion of the figure on his canvas for pure landscape painting.
It was not until Metcalf returned to the New York in 1904 and began again to paint American landscapes that his genius was revealed. Three summers painting at the Impressionist art colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut, culminated in what is one of his masterworks, May Night (1906, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D. C.), which was awarded a gold medal at the Corcoran Biennial in 1907 and was purchased by the Corcoran Gallery, thus becoming Metcalf’s first painting to enter a museum collection.In the summer of 1906 the St. Botolph Club of Boston invited Metcalf to prepare an exhibition of his paintings to be installed that fall. Metcalf lent eighteen canvases including summer moonlit scenes and autumnal landscapes. Opening on November 9, the St. Botolph showing was both a critical and financial success with ten of the canvases selling.
Metcalf continued to paint Impressionist landscapes for the remainder of his career. In the later part of his career, Metcalf received great acclaim and became renowned in particular for his snow scenes. In 1924 the Metropolitan Museum of Art purchased The North Country (1923), a snow scene, and that same year, Metcalf was notified of his election to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. On New Years Day 1925 a retrospective exhibition of Metcalf’s art opened at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C. He attended the opening, but shortly thereafter his health rapidly declined. Metcalf died on March 9, 1925.
1. Richard J. Boyle and Elizabeth de Veer, Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf (New York: Abbeville, 1987), 23.
© Copyright 2008 Hollis Taggart Galleries