Willard Leroy Metcalf (July 1, 1858 – March 9, 1925) was an American artist born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later attended Académie Julian, Paris. After early figure-painting and illustration, he became prominent as a landscape painter. He was one of the Ten American Painters who in 1897 seceded from the Society of American Artists. For some years he was an instructor in the Womans Art School, Cooper Union, New York, and in the Art Students League, New York. In 1893 he became a member of the American Watercolor Society, New York. Generally associated with American Impressionism, he is also remembered for his New England landscapes and involvement with the artists' colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Early years
Born into a working-class family, Metcalf began painting in 1874. In 1876 he opened a studio in Boston, and received a scholarship at the Boston Museum school, where he studied until 1878. In 1882 he held an exhibition at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston, the sales from which financed a study trip abroad.[1]
Metcalf left for Europe in September 1883, and did not return to the United States until late 1888. During that time he traveled and painted, studying first in Paris with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, subsequently going to England and Pont-Aven, Brittany. In the winter of 1884 he apparently met John Twachtman in Paris, and painted at Grez-sur-Loing alongside other American artists, including Theodore Robinson. His landscapes at this time were traditional renditions of peasant scenes, in the manner of Jean Millet.[2] By 1886 Metcalf was painting in Giverny, evidently the first American painter to visit there.[2] Soon thereafter he traveled to Algeria and Tunisia, returning to Giverny in the summers of 1887 and 1888, in the company of other American painters.
Return to America
Upon his return to the United States Metcalf had a solo exhibition at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. After living briefly in Philadelphia, in 1890 he opened a studio in New York, working for several years as a portrait painter, illustrator, and teacher. In 1895 he painted at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and ceased to work as an illustrator. In the late 1890s he appears to have painted little, and his contributions to the first few exhibitions of The Ten were disappointing. At the time Metcalf led a lavish social life that included heavy drinking.[3]
In 1899 Metcalf joined his friends Robert Reid and Edward Simmons in painting murals for a New York courthouse; in this genre he was no more successful than he had been as an illustrator and portraitist.[4] Metcalf's model for the murals was Marguerite Beaufort Hailé, a stage performer twenty years his junior, whom the artist would marry in 1903.[2]
Maturity
In preparation for a mural commissioned by a tobacco company, Metcalf traveled to Havana, Cuba in 1902, to make painted studies. That year he also produced a series of notable landscapes, including The Boat Landing and Battery Park-Spring.[2] These works were characterized by a new freshness of execution and lightness of palette.[5] In 1904 he resided and painted steadily in Clark's Cove, Maine. By 1905, at the encouragement of his friend Childe Hassam, he began summering in Old Lyme, working as both painter and teacher, and held successful exhibitions in New York and again at the St. Botolph Club. His expertly handled, subtle views of the New England landscape met with steady critical and financial success.[2]
In 1907 May Night (Corcoran Gallery of Art) won the Corcoran gold medal, was honored with the top purchase prize of $3,000, and was the first contemporary American painting to be bought by that institution.[6] In the same year his marriage to Marguerite dissolved when she eloped from Old Lyme with one of Metcalf's male students.[7]
Between 1909 and 1920 Metcalf often spent the winters at Cornish, New Hampshire, where he produced many snow-laden landscapes. In 1911 a large one-man exhibition toured the country, and he married his second wife, Henriette Alice Mcrea, with whom he would have two children before separating in 1920.[2] Metcalf continued to hold one-man shows in New York and Boston. During the 1910s he traveled incessantly in search of painting sites. In 1913 he spent nine months painting in Paris, Norway, England, and Italy; in the U.S., in addition to Cornish and Plainfield, New Hampshire, Metcalf lived and painted in Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine, where in 1920 he painted Benediction (now lost), a nocturne. In 1923 the painting sold for $13,000, then a record price for the work of a living American artist.[2]
The Corcoran Gallery held a large exhibition of Metcalf's work in 1925, shortly after which the artist died of a heart attack in New York City, at the age of 66.[2]
The Florence Griswold House, where Metcalf visited and stayed in Old Lyme between 1905 and 1907, now houses the largest public collection of Metcalf's paintings and personal artifacts in the world.[8]
References
§ Chambers, Bruce W., et al., May Night, Willard Metcalf in Old Lyme, Florence Griswold Museum, 2005. ISBN 1-880897-22-9.
§ Hiesinger, Ulrich W., Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters, Prestel-Verlag, 1991. ISBN 3-7913-1142-5.
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This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
