Willard Metcalf
1858–1925 · American Impressionist painter and New England landscape artist
Willard Leroy Metcalf (Lowell, 1858-New York, 1925) was an American painter associated with Impressionism, best remembered for his New England landscapes. His career shows how American artists absorbed French Impressionism in the late nineteenth century, and his work helped establish the regional landscape as a subject of American painting.
He trained in Boston, first at the Lowell Institute under George Loring Brown and then at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. From 1883 to 1888 he lived in Paris, studying at the Académie Julian with Jules Joseph Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. He visited Pont-Aven, Giverny and North Africa, and in France he crossed paths with other American painters. Back in the United States he held a solo show at the St. Botolph Club in Boston and settled in New York, where he worked as a portraitist, illustrator and teacher. His murals for a New York courthouse in 1899 brought him attention, but his real success came with landscapes.
Around 1903 he settled in Clark's Cove, Maine, and afterwards travelled across New England in search of subjects. He painted the same views in different seasons and lighting, with fluid brushwork and a luminous palette. His Impressionism was of a rather academic kind, and his ties to the Old Lyme art colony and the Ten American Painters placed him at the centre of the American art scene. "May Night" (1906) won the gold medal of the Corcoran Gallery and now belongs to the National Gallery of Art. Between 1909 and 1921 he spent much time at the Cornish Art Colony in New Hampshire, where he painted "The Cornish Hills" (1911) and "The White Veil" (1909).
His legacy survives in many American museums and also in Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum. He died in New York in March 1925, while the Corcoran Gallery was holding a large exhibition of his work.
Works (3)
An oil on canvas by Willard Metcalf, dated 1922, titled Indian Summer, Vermont. The name refers to a mild spell of late autumn, and the scene concentrates on the Vermont landscape under that soft light. The painting belongs to the collection of the Dallas Museum of Art, where it can be seen today.
Where to see the work
- Corcoran Gallery of Art Washington, D.C. · 1
- Seattle Art Museum Seattle · 1
- Dallas Museum of Art Dallas · 1
Curiosities
A record for a living artist
In 1923 one of his paintings, "Benediction", a nocturne he had made in Maine in 1920, sold for 13,000 dollars, then the highest sum ever paid for the work of a living American artist. Unfortunately the picture is now lost, and it is known mainly from the documentation of its time.
A poet of the hills
Critics compared his Cornish paintings with the poetry of Robert Frost and Walt Whitman. One of them called him the "poet laureate of the New England hills", a label that shows how his scenes of changing seasons and modest villages were read almost as literature.