Willard Metcalf

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 Women's 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 Old Lyme Art Colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut and his influential years at the Cornish Art Colony.

Willard Metcalf studied at Académie Julian and School of the Museum of Fine Arts. The recorded working language is English. The field of work recorded is painting. Childe Hassam and Impressionism are recorded as an influence. Work by Willard Metcalf is recorded in the collections of Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Brooklyn Museum and Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco.

• Name — Willard Metcalf • Born — 1 July 1858 • Birthplace — Lowell, Massachusetts • Died — 9 March 1925 • Place of death — New York City • Movement — Impressionism Landscape art • Awards — American Academy of Arts and Letters Inductee • Known for — Painting • Training — School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Académie Julian, Paris

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. 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. By 1886 Metcalf was painting in Giverny, evidently the first American painter to visit there. 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. • Illustration — Cornish Hills, 1911, oil on canvas

• Illustration — On the Suffolk Coast, 1885 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. 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. Metcalf's model for the murals was Marguerite Beaufort Hailé, a stage performer twenty years his junior, whom the artist would marry in 1903.

• Illustration — The Ten Cent Breakfast • Illustration — May Night, 1906, oil on canvas, National Gallery of Art 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. These works were characterized by a new freshness of execution and lightness of palette. 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. In 1907 May Night won the Corcoran Gallery of Art's gold medal, was honored with the top purchase prize of $3,000, and became the first contemporary American painting to be bought by that institution. It remains one of Metcalf's best known works and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. In the same year his marriage to Marguerite dissolved when she eloped from Old Lyme with one of Metcalf's male students.

Metcalf frequently visited the Cornish Art Colony, centered in the villages of Plainfield and Cornish, New Hampshire between 1909 and 1921, often during the quiet winter seasons when many of the colony's residents had returned to the city. The colony stretched over gentle, open hills along the Connecticut River with views of Mount Ascutney in Vermont, a landscape which garnered it comparisons to Tuscany and a crop of Italianate summer homes. In 1909, Louis Shipman, a playwright and husband of landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman, invited Metcalf to join him for a winter in Plainfield, at his estate there, Brook Place. • Illustration — My Wife and Daughter, Willard Metcalf, 1917 Metcalf would return faithfully for many winters, and at least one summer after that. He was good friends with colonist Charles Platt, on whose Cornish estate he honeymooned, with his second wife, Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf in 1911. Varying year to year, he stayed with the Shipmans, or a converted grist mill close to the village of Plainfield. His frequent Cornish muse was Blow-me-down Brook, a small creek which runs through the area, and passed along his residence. Other works depict the hills, the Shipman residence or other country buildings. His production in Cornish exemplified and elevated his reputation for painting modest and intimate scenery of the changing seasons, elements which are represented in his work from the time. The pieces he produced in the Cornish area brought an unusual time of social, critical and commercial success in his life, so often filled with personal tumult. His paintings were compared with the poetry of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and other writers, earning him a reputation, in the words of one critic, as the "poet laureate of the New England hills." While at the colony he painted around 35 landscapes, including Blow-Me-Down (1911), The Village-September Morning (1911) and The White Veil (1909) and the lovely, masterful "Cornish Hills" (1911). • Illustration — The heading of Willard Metcalf's obituary, published in the New York Times after his 1925 death, recognizes his rag to riches story as typifying "the romance of American Life."

Summer Morning, Giverny (c. 1888), sold at Christie's for $422,500 in 2010 Midsummer Twilight (c. 1890, France), at the National Gallery of Art May Night (1906), at the National Gallery of Art, painted in Old Lyme The White Veil (1909), Rhode Island School of Design Museum • He painted this in Plainfield by the Shipman house, and later created a second copy, The White Veil (no. 2), now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, upon return to New York. It was among his best winter landscapes and received critical praise at an exhibition with the Ten American Painters. The Village- September Morning (1911), the Hevrdejs Collection, his only depiction of Plainfield Village Benediction (1923), now lost, gained greatest sum for a work by a living American artist