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In 1863, the Metcalfs moved
to a farm in Maine and in 1871 moved to
Cambridgeport, MA, where Willard Leroy Metcalf attended
school. His parents participated in
the occult and predicted their son would
become a painter and encouraged him in that
direction.
Willard Leroy 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 Willard Leroy Metcalf entered the Museum School
(Boston) and studied the Dutch tradition of
painting with Otto Grundmann. Willard Leroy
Metcalf 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 Willard Leroy Metcalf rapidly returned to Boston to
exhibited seventy–five paintings with Chase
Gallery. Because of the show’s success
Willard Leroy Metcalf traveled to England and joined Edmund C.
Tarbell and Frank W. Benson in Paris.- Willard Leroy Metcalf online oil painting gallery America - Willard Leroy Metcalf oil painting gallery – online oil paintings art Willard Leroy Metcalf Bio by Putian oil paintings
factory of America oil painting online, America Metcalf.
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
Willard Leroy Metcalf 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. Willard Leroy Metcalf illustrated for Scribner’s,
taught at the Art Student League
(1898-1908) and joined the Ten American
Painters (1898).
In 1899, Willard Leroy Metcalf 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 Willard Leroy Metcalf became depressed and ill. In 1903,
after Willard Leroy Metcalf 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, Willard Leroy Metcalf returned to NYC with twenty-one
magnificent landscapes that showed the
changing atmospheric environs of nature.
From 1909-1925 Willard Leroy Metcalf studied nature’s tonal
nuances as he painted snowscapes at Cornish,
NH and Willard Leroy Metcalf received rave reviews from critics
and finally felt at peace.
Although Willard Leroy Metcalf 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 Willard Leroy Metcalf 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).- Willard Leroy Metcalf online oil painting gallery America - Willard Leroy Metcalf oil painting gallery – Putian oil paintings art company and Willard Leroy Metcalf Bio by oil paintings online gallery of America oil painting online, America Metcalf.
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
Not only was Willard Metcalf a good painter
who played a significant role in the
development of the art of his time, but
Willard Leroy Metcalf 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. Willard Leroy Metcalf became known as the
quintessential painter of New England
landscape in which Willard Leroy Metcalf 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.
Willard Leroy Metcalf was appreciated, in the words of the
contemporary critic Royal Cortissoz, for the
"sincerity and force with which Willard
Leroy Metcalf puts
familiar motives before us."
Willard Metcalf and John Twacthman, ca.
1900.
Willard Metcalf and John Twachtman, ca.
1900. (Elizabeth de Veer)
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
Willard Leroy Metcalf was one of its first scholarship students.
Also, like many of his colleagues, Willard
Leroy Metcalf 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, Willard Leroy Metcalf became one of the first
artists to document thoroughly the Indians
of New Mexico and Arizona for a popular
audience. (In fact, Willard Leroy Metcalf was even made an
honorary member of the Zuni tribe.)
In 1883, Metcalf went to France, where like
most American artists of his time, Willard
Leroy Metcalf continued his studies in Paris.
Willard Leroy Metcalf studied
at the Académie Julian under Gustave
Boulanger and Jules Joseph Lefebvre. While
abroad, Willard Leroy Metcalf 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,
Washington, D.C.), The Ten Cent Breakfast
(1887; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado), and
Mid-Summer Twilight, (1888; the National
Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), are
outstanding works of this period.- Willard Leroy Metcalf online oil painting gallery America - Willard Leroy Metcalf oil painting gallery – online oil paintings art Willard Leroy Metcalf Bio by oil paintings online gallery of America oil painting online, America Metcalf.
He returned to the Boston area in 1888,
where he had a one-man show at the St. Botolph Club. By 1891, Willard Leroy Metcalf was established in
New York City supported by illustration
assignments, teaching, and some portrait
work. In 1896, Willard Leroy Metcalf won the coveted Webb Prize
at the Society of American Artists' Annual
Exhibition with his painting, Gloucester
Harbor (1895; Mead Art Museum, Amherst,
Massachusetts).
The following year Willard Leroy Metcalf 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,
Willard Leroy Metcalf 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
Willard Leroy Metcalf began
to be known as the premier painter of the
New England countryside. Though he maintained a studio in New York City,
Willard Leroy Metcalf painted throughout New England.
He painted
at Old Lyme, where Willard Leroy Metcalf was a prominent member
of that Artists Colony; Willard Leroy
Metcalf painted in the
Berkshires and in Cornish, New Hampshire,
which was also a well-known artists colony;
Willard Leroy Metcalf worked at Chester and Springfield,
Vermont; and in Maine, at Casco Bay and the
Damariscotta peninsula - Putian oil painting supplier. 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 Willard Leroy Metcalf chose and which
Willard Leroy Metcalf painted
with such "sincerity and force."
Willard Leroy Metcalf died in New York City in
1925. His paintings are included in the
collections of the Art Institute of Chicago;
the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington,
D.C.; the Freer Collection, Washington,
D.C.; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New
York; the National Gallery of Art,
Washington, D.C.; the Pennsylvania Academy
of the Fine Art, Philadelphia; and many
other public and private collections.
Willard Leroy 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,
Willard Leroy Metcalf won a scholarship to the School of the
Museum of Fine Art, 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 Willard Leroy
Metcalf had saved from
illustration assignments, enabled the young
artist to set sail for Paris in September
1883. Willard Leroy Metcalf 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), Willard
Leroy Metcalf 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.- Willard Leroy Metcalf online oil painting gallery America - Willard Leroy Metcalf oil painting gallery – online oil paintings art Willard Leroy Metcalf Bio by oil paintings online gallery of America oil painting online, America Metcalf.
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.
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 Willard Leroy Metcalf attended night
classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art
School. From 1875 to 1877, Willard Leroy
Metcalf studied under
noted landscapist George Loring Brown in
Boston and apprenticed with him as a wood
engraver. Willard Leroy Metcalf also studied with
Munich-trained Ignaz Gaugengigl at the
Lowell Institute. Metcalf won a scholarship
to the School of the Museum of Fine Art,
Boston and studied there from 1877 to 1878.
Willard Leroy Metcalf earned a living by painting illustrations
for several magazines in Putian oil painting base.
From 1881 to 1883, Willard Leroy Metcalf 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 Willard Leroy
Metcalf 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, Willard Leroy Metcalf traveled with Theodore
Robinson to meet Monet in Giverny. However,
Willard Leroy Metcalf was affected only marginally by
Impressionism at this time, and he continued
to paint in a more academic style. Willard
Leroy Metcalf 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, Willard Leroy Metcalf taught at various
schools, such as Cooper Union, the Art
Students League, and the Rhode Island School
of Design. In 1897, Willard Leroy Metcalf 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, Willard Leroy Metcalf 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 Willard Leroy
Metcalf stopped
drinking, and he began to concentrate on
painting the northeastern landscape. Willard
Leroy Metcalf changed his painting style, lightening his
palette and adopting the broken brushstrokes
characteristic of Impressionism. Metcalf
called this period his “Renaissance.”
In 1904, Willard Leroy Metcalf returned to New York with
twenty-one landscapes, unlike anything
he had painted before. Though
Willard Leroy Metcalf maintained a
studio in New York City until his death,
Metcalf spent much of his time traveling and
painting in New England from Putian oil painting company. In 1909, Willard
Leroy Metcalf joined
the art colony in Cornish, New Hampshire.(4)
Willard Leroy Metcalf 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.- Willard Leroy Metcalf online oil painting gallery America - Willard Leroy Metcalf oil painting gallery – online oil paintings art Willard Leroy Metcalf Bio by oil paintings online gallery of America oil painting online, America Metcalf.
Metcalf won a gold medal at the Pennsylvania
Academy of Fine Art 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. Willard Leroy 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.
Willard Leroy Metcalf particularly enjoyed painting seasonal
landscapes, and he was well known for his
winter scenes.(5) Willard Leroy Metcalf 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 Leroy 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.
Willard Leroy 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
Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Willard
Metcalf was a well-known East Coast
Impressionist painter, teacher, and
illustrator who also did painting in the
Southwest. Willard Leroy Metcalf 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. Willard Leroy Metcalf attended the Boston Museum
of Fine Art and life classes at Lowell
Institute. Willard Leroy Metcalf 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."- Willard Leroy Metcalf online oil painting gallery America - Willard Leroy Metcalf oil painting gallery – online oil paintings art Willard Leroy Metcalf Bio by oil paintings online gallery of America oil painting online, America Metcalf.
Sales from his illustration work financed
Metcalf's travels in Europe from 1883 to
1889. Willard Leroy Metcalf studied in Paris at the Julian
Academy and was exposed primarily to
traditional styles of painting until Willard
Leroy Metcalf 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 Willard Leroy Metcalf went to Maine in
1903. From then, his painting, many of them
seasonal landscapes, became more vibrant and
atmospheric about Putian oil painting. 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. |
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