Biography from Pierce Galleries, Inc.:
| Willard Leroy Metcalf (American, 1858-1925):
Impressionist painter Willard Leroy Metcalf was born July 1, 1858 in Lowell, MA the son of Greenleaf Willard, a violinist with the Boston Orchestra and Margaret Jan Gallop. In 1863, the Metcalfs moved to a farm in Maine and in 1871 moved to Cambridgeport, MA, where Metcalf attended school. Metcalf’s parents participated in the occult and predicted their son would become a painter and encouraged him in that direction.
Metcalf attended the Mass. Normal Art School (Boston), apprenticed as a wood engraver (1874) and studied with George Loring Brown (who taught him to draw accurately truths in nature, and to paint Roman figures, judges and wreathed heads with the same precision) in South Boston and with Munich-trained Ignaz Gaugengigl at the Lowell Institute. The next year he entered the Museum School (Boston) and studied the Dutch tradition of painting with Otto Grundmann. He became the 1st scholarship recipient of the Museum School (1878) and struggled to survive by painting illustrations for Harper’s (1882).
That same year, Century magazine commissioned him to travel with Frank Cushing of the Smithsonian Institution and Boston newsman Sylvester Baxter to draw and paint Zuni Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, but the heat nearly killed Metcalf and he rapidly returned to Boston to exhibited seventy–five paintings with Chase Gallery. Because of the show’s success he traveled to England and joined Edmund C. Tarbell and Frank W. Benson in Paris.
Metcalf studied with Jules-Joseph Boulanger and Gustave-Rodolphe Lefebvre at the Académie Julian and painted in Pont Aven, Brittany, Grez-sur-Laing, Dieppe and in Giverny with Monet (1885-1886). In the fall of 1887 he painted in Tunis, Algeria and Morocco and returned that year to the U.S. to share a Tenth Street studio in NYC with impressionist painter Robert Reid, and a summer studio in Old Lyme (CT) with William H. Howe. He illustrated for Scribner’s, taught at the Arts Student League (1898-1908) and joined the Ten American Painters (1898).
In 1899, he painted in Gloucester with Charles A. Winter and J.H. Twachtman and in 1901 married his model Marguerite Beaufort Haile (an aspiring actress from New Orleans). When his wife ran off with painter Robert Nisbet (1902), Metcalf became an alcoholic and when Twachtman died that same year he became depressed and ill. In 1903, after he moved to Clark’s Cove (ME), stopped drinking and began to lighten his palette and paint with a looser brush, Metcalf confessed this period was his “new-birth,” or “Renaissance.”
In 1904, he returned to NYC with twenty-one magnificent landscapes that showed the changing atmospheric environs of nature. From 1909-1925 he studied nature’s tonal nuances as he painted snowscapes at Cornish, NH and he received rave reviews from critics and finally felt at peace.
Although he married Henriette Alice McCrea in 1911 and the couple had two children, McCrea would not play second fiddle to Metcalf’s art and drinking and she divorced him in 1921.
Metcalf continued to paint muted colors in delicate tapestries that explored the American landscape and the New York Herald (March 21, 1920) noted that in the study of winter he had “achieved his special metier.” Metcalf died in New York City March 9, 1925 a respected landscape impressionist who is represented in museums throughout America.
Awards: Paris Salon, hon. mention (1888); PAFA (gold, 1907, 1912); Columbian Expo., Chicago, 1893 (medal); SAA 1896 (medal); St. Louis Expo. (medal, 1904); Corcoran Gallery (gold medal, 1907); Art Institute of Chicago (silver medal, 1910); Buenos Aires Expo, (gold medal, 1910)
Solo Exhibitions include: St. Botolph Club (1889); Adler & Schwartz Gallery, NYC (1905); Corcoran Gallery (1925); Montross Gallery (1910, NYC);Newport AA (inaugural, 1912); Milch Galleries, NCY (Memorial, 1925); Spanierman Gallery, Retrospective (1996); Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College (1999).
Bibliography: Richard Boyle & E. DeVeer, Sunlight & Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard Metcalf (Abbeville, NY, 1988); Patricia Jobe Pierce, The Ten (1976).
Patricia Jobe Pierce, historian |
Biography from Spanierman Gallery:
| Not only was Willard Metcalf a good painter who played a significant role in the development of the art of his time, but he touched upon the way people felt about the American landscape in all of its variety. Like his friend John Twachtman, Metcalf was a landscape painter from the start; he had a feeling for it. He became known as the quintessential painter of New England landscape in which he was born.
The directness of his style and its absence of artificiality was not only appropriate to the subject but was prized by his peers. He was appreciated, in the words of the contemporary critic Royal Cortissoz, for the "sincerity and force with which he puts familiar motives before us."
Like many of his colleagues, Metcalf started his career as a wood engraver, and after a short apprenticeship with the noted landscapist, George Loring Brown, Metcalf attended the Boston Museum School, where he was one of its first scholarship students. Also like many of his colleagues he turned to illustration as a means of making money, an activity he engaged in from 1881 to about 1896.
It was an activity that led him to the Southwest in 1881, where through his illustrations for "Harper's" and "Century" magazines, he became one of the first artists to document thoroughly the Indians of New Mexico and Arizona for a popular audience. (In fact, he was even made an honorary member of the Zuni tribe.)
In 1883, Metcalf went to France, where like most American artists of his time, he continued his studies in Paris. He studied at the Académie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. While abroad he absorbed the major stylistic tendencies of the day -- from the academic through Barbizon and Plein-air to Impressionism -- both in Paris and during summer sojourns at Pont Aven, Grez-sur-Loing and Giverny. "Sunset at Grez" (1884-85, Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden), "The Ten Cent Breakfast" (1887, the Denver Art Museum) and "Mid-Summer Twilight," (1888, the National Gallery of Art), are outstanding works of this period.
He returned to the Boston area in 1888, where he had a one-man show at the St. Botolph Club. By 1891, he was established in New York City supported by illustration assignments, teaching and some portrait work. In 1896, he won the coveted Webb Prize at the Society of American Artists' Annual Exhibition with his painting, "Gloucester Harbor" (1895, Mead Art Museum).
The following year he composed the statement of secession for The Ten American Painters, who broke away from the Society to exhibit on their own, and who constituted a kind of academy of American Impressionism. In 1899, he painted two murals for the Appellate Court building in New York City, but a 1904 trip to Maine caused a decisive change for the better in Metcalf's style.
His quiet and luminous depiction of the New England countryside was marked by a happy combination of native realism and French Impressionism. It was from this time of his self-proclaimed "Renaissance" that he began to be known as the premier painter of the New England countryside. Though he maintained a studio in New York City, he painted throughout New England. He painted at Old Lyme, where he was a prominent member of that Artists Colony; he painted in the Berkshires and in Cornish, New Hampshire, which was also a well-known artists colony; he worked at Chester and Springfield, Vermont; and in Maine, at Casco Bay and the Damariscotta peninsula.
And throughout, his wiry brush work and clean-cut color, a method and style analogous to the poetry of Robert Frost, was especially appropriate to the subject he chose and which he painted with such "sincerity and force."
Willard L. Metcalf died in New York City in 1925, the same year as John Singer Sargent and a year before Mary Cassatt. |
Biography from Owen Gallery:
| Willard Metcalf was the only child born to a blue collar, New England
family that frequently moved throughout Maine and Massachusetts,
finally settling in Cambridgeport, Massachusetts in 1871.
By 1874, Metcalf began to produce his first paintings and attended
night classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. In
1877, he won a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts,
Boston. In February 1882, Metcalf organized an auction of his art
works in order to raise money for European travel. The money
earned from the auction, along with funds he had saved from
illustration assignments, enabled the young artist to set sail for
Paris in September 1883. He remained abroad for more than five
years, studying at the Academie Julian and traveling extensively
throughout Europe and North Africa.
After returning to the United States in 1888, Metcalf finally settled
in New York in 1890, earning an income as a portraitist, illustrator,
and teacher. Although Metcalf's life in the late 1890s was marked
by "fitful person relationships and [artistic] unproductiveness"
(Ulrich Hiesinger, Impressionism in America,
p. 24), he counted among his friends such artists as J. Henry
Twachtman, Robert Reid, and Edward Simmons. In 1898, Metcalf was
one of the founding members of The Ten, a group of artists who rebelled
against the tight strictures of the National Academy of Design.
Metcalf managed eventually to get his problems under control, and
enjoyed a long, successful career, despite the occasional re-emergence
of bouts of financial troubles, romantic conflicts, and heavy drinking.
One indication of his reputation during his lifetime was the sale of Benediction for thirteen-thousand dollars, then the highest price ever paid for a painting by a living American artist.
In 1925, a year after the failure of his second marriage, Metcalf suffered a fatal heart attack. |
Biography from The Columbus Museum-Georgia:
| Willard Leroy Metcalf was born July 1, 1858, in Lowell Massachusetts, the son of Greenleaf Willard Metcalf, a violinist with the Boston Orchestra, and Margaret Jan Gallop, a loom tender.(1) In 1863, the Metcalf family moved to Maine, and eight years later, they moved to Cambridgeport, Massachusetts, where Metcalf attended school. His parents believed in supernatural phenomena, and having been told in a séance that their son would become a famous painter, they encouraged him in that direction. By 1874, Metcalf had produced his first paintings, and he attended night classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. From 1875 to 1877, he studied under noted landscapist George Loring Brown in Boston and apprenticed with him as a wood engraver. He also studied with Munich-trained Ignaz Gaugengigl at the Lowell Institute. Metcalf won a scholarship to the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston and studied there from 1877 to 1878. He earned a living by painting illustrations for several magazines.
From 1881 to 1883, he traveled in Arizona and New Mexico with the journalist Sylvester Baker and Frank Cushing of the Smithsonian Institution to document the Zuni Indians for Harper’s and Century magazines.
After this trip, Metcalf returned to Boston and exhibited seventy-five paintings with Chase Gallery. The money earned from the exhibition, along with funds he had saved during his employment as an illustrator, allowed him to travel abroad in 1883. Metcalf studied with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefèbvre at the Académie Julian in Paris. In 1886, he traveled with Theodore Robinson to meet Monet in Giverny. However, he was affected only marginally by Impressionism at this time, and he continued to paint in a more academic style. He won an honorable mention at the Paris Salon of 1888.
Metcalf returned to the U.S. in late 1888 to share a studio in New York with impressionist painter Robert Reid. Over the next ten years, he taught at various schools, such as Cooper Union, the Art Students League, and the Rhode Island School of Design. In 1897, he wrote the statement of secession for The Ten American Painters, who had broken away from the National Academy of Design to exhibit on their own.(2) Although the artists in this group were inspired primarily by Impressionism, Metcalf’s paintings at this time did not adhere to that aesthetic.
In 1903, he married Marguerite Beaufort Haile, an aspiring actress from New Orleans who was his model.(3) Their life together was characterized by excessive drinking and socializing.
In 1904, Metcalf moved to Clark’s Cove, Maine. There he stopped drinking, and he began to concentrate on painting the northeastern landscape. He changed his painting style, lightening his palette and adopting the broken brushstrokes characteristic of Impressionism. Metcalf called this period his “Renaissance.”
In 1904, he returned to New York with twenty-one landscapes, unlike anything he had painted before.
Though he maintained a studio in New York City until his death, Metcalf spent much of his time traveling and painting in New England. In 1909, he joined the art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire.(4) He painted at Old Lyme, where he was a prominent member of that artist colony, in the Berkshires, at Chester and Springfield, Vermont, and in Maine, at Casco Bay and the Damariscotta peninsula.
Metcalf won a gold medal at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts exhibition in 1907. He married Henriette Alice McCrea in 1911, and the couple had two children. The artist enjoyed a lengthy, flourishing career, despite the occasional bouts of financial troubles and alcoholism, which ultimately led Henriette to leave him in 1921. Metcalf suffered a heart attack and died on March 9, 1925, in New York.
Unlike the other members of The Ten, Metcalf never painted with a completely impressionist technique, but used stylistic elements of both Tonalism and Impressionism. He particularly enjoyed painting seasonal landscapes, and he was well known for his winter scenes.(5) He felt that landscape could be employed in the solution of painting problems, such as exploring white as a color through painting a snow scene.(6)
Footnotes:
1. Biographical information taken from the following: Elizabeth de Veer and Richard J. Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987); Barbara J. MacAdam, Winter’s Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire 1909-1920 (Hanover, New Hampshire: Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1999); Patricia Jobe Pierce, The Ten (Concord, NH: Rumford Press, 1976); and Michael David Zellman, American Art Analogue (New York: Chelsea House Publishers, 1986), 543. Specific dates in Metcalf’s biography vary from publication to publication; the dates in this entry were taken from de Veer and Boyle.
2. The other members were: Frank Weston Benson, Joseph Rodefer De Camp, Thomas Dewing, Childe Hassam, Robert Reid, Edward E. Simmons, Edmund C. Tarbell, John H. Twachtman, and Julian Alden Weir. There were actually a total of eleven members; William Merritt Chase was asked to join the group after the death of Twachtman.
3. Marguerite left him for the painter Robert Nisbet in 1907.
4. The sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens founded the artist colony at Cornish. Metcalf often painted there, as did other artists such as Maxfield Parrish, Kenyon Cox, and Thomas Dewing.
5. Tonalism, popular from the 1860s to the early 1900s in American art, is characterized by landscapes painted with soft application and quiet color harmonies.
6. Richard J. Boyle, Spanierman Gallery, Willard Leroy Metcalf An American Impressionist 1996, n.p.
Submitted by the Staff of the Columbus Museum, Georgia
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Biography from AskART:
| Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Willard Metcalf was a well-known East Coast Impressionist painter, teacher, and illustrator who also did painting in the Southwest. He was heralded in 1925 as the "poet laureate of the New England hills."
He attended Lowell and Newton public schools, apprenticed to a wood engraver, and studied landscape painting with George Loring Brown. He attended the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and life classes at Lowell Institute. He did much work in the Southwest, and as early as 1881, was in Santa Fe. His illustrations of the Zuni Indians for Frank Cushing's ethnological studies appeared in "Century Magazine" in 1882 and 1883, and other Pueblo illustrations were in "Harper's Magazine."
Sales from his illustration work financed Metcalf's travels in Europe from 1883 to 1889. He studied in Paris at the Julian Academy and was exposed primarily to traditional styles of painting until he visited Giverny, the home of Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Metcalf was perhaps the first American to arrive there. However, his word did not show much reflection of this new style until he went to Maine in 1903. From then, his painting, many of them seasonal landscapes, became more vibrant and atmospheric. His interest in Impressionism led him to become one of the founders of The Ten, a group of Boston and New York painters pioneering and promoting that style.
He settled in New York City and worked as a magazine and book illustrator and teacher at Cooper Union and the Art Students League, but continued to visit the New England landscape and became one of the leading members of the Old Lyme Art Colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut.
Source:
Peggy and Harold Samuels, "The Illustrated Encyclopedia of Artists of the American West"
Michael David Zellman, "300 Years of American Art"
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Willard Metcalf was born in July 1,1858 to a blue collar, New England family in Lowell, Massachusetts. His father was a violinist with the Boston Orchestra. When Willard was five they moved to a farm in Maine and later to Cambridgeport, Massachusetts where Willard attended school. His parents participated in the occult and predicted that their son would become a painter and encouraged him in that direction.
Metcalf attended the Massachusetts Normal Art School in Boston, apprenticed as a wood engraver and studied with George Loring Brown and Ignaz Gaugengigi at the Lowell Institute. The next year he entered the Museum School in Boston and studied the Dutch tradition of painting with Otto Grundmann. He became the first scholarship recipient of the Museum School and struggled to survive by painting illustrations for Harper's magazine.
That same year (1882) he was commissioned to travel with Frank Cushing of the Smithsonian Institute and Boston newsman Sylvester Baxter to draw and paint Zuni Indians in Arizona and New Mexico, but the heat nearly killed Metcalf. He returned to Boston where he had a very successful show at the Chase Gallery after which he traveled to England and joined Edmund Tarbell and Frank W. Benson in Paris. He studied with Boulanger and Lefebvre at the Academie Julian and painted all over France including in Giverny with Monet. In 1887 he traveled to Tunis, Algiers and Morocco and then returned to the United States to share a studio with Robert Reid and a summer studio in Old Lyme, Connecticut with William H. Howe. He illustrated for Scribner's, taught at the Art Students League and joined the Ten American Painters.
In 1901 Metcalf married his model Marguerite Beaufort Haile, an aspiring actress from New Orleans. When his wife ran off with painter Robert Nisbet the following year, Metcalf became an alcoholic, depressed and ill. In 1903 he stopped drinking and began to lighten his palette and paint with a looser brush. He received rave reviews for his work from critics and finally felt at peace. In 1911 he had married Henriette Alice McCrea and the couple had two children. But it was during a period when he was still drinking and she divorced him in 1921. He died in New York City on March 9, 1925.
Written and submitted by Jean Ershler Schatz, artist and researcher from Laguna Woods, California.
Sources:
From the internet, AskART.com
American Art Review, Vol.XI, No. 1 1999
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Note, May 2005, from Ira "Bud" Hillyer:
"May 27,2005 edition of "Antiques and the Arts Weekly" has a three full-pages article on Willard Metcalf
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