Willard Leroy Metcalf

An American Impressionist best known for New England landscapes

By Alexandra A. Jopp

Willard Metcalf, a founding member of the “Ten American Painters,” worked in an Impressionist style tempered by atmospheric poetry.

I. Biography

Willard Metcalf, a contemporary of Childe Hassam, Mary Cassatt, and John Twachtman, was a well-regarded Impressionist artist, teacher and illustrator who became known as a classic painter of the landscapes of his native New England. One of the “Ten American Painters” (also known as “The Ten”), a group whose members resigned from the Society of American Artists to form their own (small) association, Metcalf influenced many painters while teaching at Cooper Union and the Art Students League in New York. He achieved great fame in his lifetime, winning a Webb Prize in 1896 for his painting Gloucester Harbor (1895), being elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and having his work exhibited at the Corcoran Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.

Willard Leroy Metcalf, known to his friends as “Metty,” was born July 1, 1858, in Lowell, Mass., to Greenleaf Willard, a violinist with the Boston Orchestra and Margaret Jan Gallop. He spent much of his childhood in Maine before the family moved to Cambridge, Mass., in 1871. His early artistic gifts were celebrated by his parents, and Metcalf started working in a Boston wood engraving shop while attending classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (now the Massachusetts College of Art.) At age 16, he was apprenticed to the painter George Loring Brown, and two years later, he was admitted to the Boston Museum of Fine Arts School, where he received one of the school’s first scholarships and studied under William Rimmer.

In 1883, Metcalf went to Europe for the first time, and while there, he traveled broadly, painting in England, Italy, North Africa and several French locations. In 1885, near Fontainebleau, he completed Sunset at Grez (1885), a stunning success from his early art career. He studied in Paris at the prestigious Académie Julian and painted landscapes at Grez near Barbizon, Pont-Aven, Brittany and Giverny, in the company of some of the best painters of his generation. Drawn by French Impressionist Claude Monet’s reputation, he may have been the first American artist to arrive to Giverny in 1886 before the area became a veritable colony of American Impressionists. While Metcalf’s landscapes of the late 1880s reveal increasing skill in brushwork and the use of light, the artist remained partial to the atmospheric poetry of Tonalism and the Barbizon tradition of painting outdoors. He did not copy the technique of Monet, whose children he tutored in the study of flowers and birds. Rather than adopting a consistent style, in fact, Metcalf allowed his subjects to determine his technique.

In 1888, Metcalf returned to the Boston area, where he held a one-man exhibition at the St. Botolph Club. Two years later, in search of portrait commissions, he moved to New York City. His prolific year of 1895 was marked by bright, sun-lit outdoor scenes inspired by his summers in Gloucester, Mass.

Metcalf was a sociable man who enjoyed gathering with companions for long evenings of dining and drinking; however, he had unhappy and tawdry relationships with women, marrying twice and divorcing twice. His first wife, Marguerite Beaufort Hailé, was a stage performer from New Orleans who was 20 years his junior and served as his model for murals he painted for a New York courthouse. They began living together in 1899 and were married in 1903. The marriage was brief and ended when Marguerite ran away with painter Robert Nisbet, a former student of Metcalf’s.

In 1909, the artist, attracted by the area’s winter scenes, moved to Cornish, N.H. According to Deborah Van Buren, “there are probably more known paintings of the Cornish landscape by Metcalf than by any other colony members.”1 Writer Catherine Beach Ely said that “he gives us the mood of snow-filled air and the frost feeling of Winter among lonely hills and trees; [he] gives us also the first disintegrated breach of Spring on deep New England snows.”2

Spring came again to the artist’s life in 1911 when he married Henriette Alice McCrea, with whom he had two children. This marriage also failed, however.

Metcalf had a gift for drawing and a fortune for travel, and from 1920 to 1924, he painted all over New England. He continued to produce compelling scenes of nature in its seasonal phases almost until his death at his home in New York in 1925.

II. Chronology

• 1858 Born on July 1 in Lowell, Mass.
• 1876 Opened a studio in Boston and received a scholarship at the Boston Museum School
• 1882 Held an exhibition at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston, the sales from which financed his study trip abroad
• 1883 Went to Europe
• 1888 Returned to the Boston area
• 1890 Opened a studio in New York, where he worked for several years as a portrait painter, illustrator and teacher
• 1895 Painted in Gloucester, Mass., and stopped working as an illustrator
• 1902 Traveled to Cuba to make painted studies in preparation for a mural commissioned by a tobacco company
• 1903 Married to Marguerite Beaufort Hailé, a stage performer 20 years his junior; exhibited with “The Ten” and made the first of many trips to the colony at Old Lyme
• 1905 Summered in Old Lyme with his friend Childe Hassam
• 1907 May Night (1906) won the Corcoran Gallery of Art’s gold medal and was purchased for $3,000, becoming the first contemporary American painting to be bought by that foundation
• 1909 Attracted by its winter landscapes, Metcalf moved to Cornish, N.H
• 1911 A large one-man exhibition toured the country; married his second wife, Henriette Alice McCrea
• 1913 Spent nine months painting in France, Norway, England and Italy
• 1909 -1920 Worked around Cornish, N.H., primarily during the winter months
• 1923 Painting Benediction sold for $ 13,000, then a record sum to be paid to a living American artist
• 1925 Died from a heart attack in New York City on March 9

III. Collections

• Addison Gallery of American Art, Andover, MA
• Akron Art Museum, Ohio
• Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, IN
• Bush-Holley Historic Museum, Greenwich, CT
• Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio
• Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, VA
• Cornish Colony Museum, Windsor, Vermont
• Dallas Museum of Art
• De Young Museum, San Francisco, CA
• Denver Art Museum
• Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, CT
• Frederic Remington Art Museum, Ogdensburg, New York
• Freer Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• Hood Museum of Art, Hanover, NH
• LaSalle University Art Museum, Philadelphia, PA
• Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Laurel, Mississippi
• Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts
• Metropolitan Museum of Art
• Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute, Utica, NY
• Musée d’Art Américain Giverny
• Museum of Fine Arts, Boston
• Museum of Fine Arts-Springfield, MA
• Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, NM
• Muskegon Museum of Art, MI
• National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.
• New Britain Museum of American Art
• North Carolina Museum of Art
• Oklahoma City Museum of Art
• Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts
• Rhode Island School of Design-Museum of Art
• Rochester Art Center
• Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery, Scripps College
• San Diego Museum of Art
• Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska
• Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts
• Smithsonian American Art Museum
• Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, GA
• The Brooklyn Museum of Art
• The Columbus Museum of Art-Ohio
• The Columbus Museum-Georgia
• The Cummer Museum of Art & Gardens, Jacksonville, FL
• The Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, NH
• The Detroit Institute of Arts
• The Hudson River Museum, Yonkers, NY
• The Huntington Library & Gallery
• The Hyde Collection, Glen Falls, NY
• The Parrish Art Museum, Southampton, NY
• The University of Michigan Museum of Art
• The Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, MD
• The White House
• University Of Kentucky Art Museum
• Wadsworth Atheneum Museum of Art, Hartford, CT
• Yale University Art Gallery

IV. Exhibitions

• 1879-89 Boston Art Club
• 1883, 1893-1919, 1924 Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Art
• 1888 Paris Salon
• 1893 Columbian Expo, Chicago,
• 1896 Society of American Artists
• 1898-1919 Ten American Painters
• 1900 Paris Expo
• 1901 Pan-American Expo, Buffalo
• 1904 St. Louis Expo
• 1905 Fishel, Adler & Schwartz Gallery, New York
• 1906 St. Botolph Club, Boston
• 1910-11 Montross Gallery, New York
• 1907-23, 1925 Corcoran Gallery of Art
• 1910 Art Institute of Chicago
• 1910 Buenos Aires Expo
• 1912 Newport Art Association
• 1925 Milch Gallery, New York
• 1996 Spanierman Gallery, New York
• 1999 Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College

V. Memberships

• American Academy of Arts & Letters
• American Watercolor Society
• Century Association
• League of American Artists
• National Institute of Arts & Letters
• The Players
• Ten American Painters (founding member)

VI. Notes

1: Shipp, Steve. American Art Colonies, 1850-1930: A Historical Guide to America’s Original Art Colonies and Their Artists (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 15.

2: Shipp, Steve. American Art Colonies, 1850-1930: A Historical Guide to America’s Original Art Colonies and Their Artists (Westport, Conn., and London: Greenwood Press, 1996), 15.

VII. Suggested Resources

• Chambers, Bruce W., et al. May Night: Willard Metcalf in Old Lyme. Florence Griswold Museum, 2005.

• De Veer, Elizabeth and Richard J. Boyle. Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf. Abbeville Press, 1987.

• Hiesinger, Ulrich W. Impressionism in America: The Ten American Painters. Prestel-Verlag, 1991.

• Torchia, Robert Wilson, Deborah Chotner and Ellen G. Miles. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part II. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1998.

• Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art, Washington (rev. ed.), 1988.