METCALF, Willard Leroy

(b. 1858 Lowell, d. 1925 New York)

American painter and illustrator. His formal education was limited, and at 17 he was apprenticed to the painter George Loring Brown of Boston. He was one of the first scholarship students admitted to the school of art sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and took classes there in 1877 and 1878. After spending several years illustrating magazine articles on the Zuni Indians of New Mexico, he decided to study abroad and in 1883 left for Paris. There he studied at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger.

During the five years he spent in France he became intimately acquainted with the countryside around the villages of Grez-sur-Loing and Giverny. He returned to America in 1888 and in the following spring exhibited oil studies executed in France, England and Africa at the St Botolph Club in Boston.

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), which was awarded a gold medal at the Corcoran Biennial in 1907 and was purchased by the Corcoran Gallery. 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. 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. He attended the opening, but shortly thereafter his health rapidly declined. Metcalf died on March 9, 1925.

Gloucester Harbour

The group called The Ten American Painters was founded in 1898. To contemporaries, the group was quickly seen as the core of American Impressionism. It was created by Childe Hassam, John Twachtman and Julian Weir. The group included Willard Metcalf, Edmund Tarbell, Frank Benson, Joseph De Camp, Thomas Dewing, Edward Simmons and Robert Reid. William Chase joined the group in 1902 after the death of Twachtman. The interest of the group was in the annual public exhibition of work that shared an aesthetic thrust. The Ten survived for almost twenty years till it was dissolved in 1917.

Willard Metcalf belonged to the Boston School. Of the Boston painters he was the only one who had also been one of the Givernists who painted in proximity to Monet in 1877. His own work did not turn to Impressionism till the mid-1890s, though, and his fame dated from his membership of The Ten. Metcalf’s was an art that celebrated the New England landscape and architecture, familiar from trips he undertook from his New York home. The radiant colours of Gloucester Harbour, painted in 1895 and one of his best known painting, show the influence of Impressionism on his art at that date. In style and subject matter, Metcalf was often palpably close to other American artists such as Robinson and particularly Hassam.

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L'Epte, Giverny

During the five years Meetcalf spent in France he became intimately acquainted with the countryside around the villages of Grez-sur-Loing and Giverny.

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