Willard LeRoy Metcalf 1858 - 1925

The artist
Estate of the artist
(Milch Galleries, New York, by 1926)
Private Collection, Texas, until 1994
(Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York, 1994–95)
Acquired by the present owner from the above, 1995

Chicago, Illinois, The Art Institute of Chicago, Twenty-third Annual Exhibition of Oil Paintings and Sculpture by American Artists, 1910, no. 155, p. 614
New York, The Milch Galleries, Exhibition of Paintings by the Late Willard L. Metcalf, February-March 1925, no. 4 (as The Water Fall)
Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Department of Fine Arts, Carnegie Institute, Paintings by Willard L. Metcalf, March 1926, no. 27 (as Waterfall)
New York, The Century Club, Paintings from the Estate of Willard L. Metcalf, 1928

We are grateful to Hirschl & Adler Galleries for providing the following essay from their archives.

"Yankee Impressionist" Willard Metcalf's paintings of New England depict nature in all her glory, season by season. It is fair to say that no American Impressionist painter more thoroughly observed the New England landscape.

Metcalf was born in Lowell, Massachusetts, and studied in Boston under the landscape painter George Loring Brown and at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts. From 1881 to 1883 he lived among the Zuni Indians in the Southwest, making illustrations of their life for Harper's, Century, and Survey magazines. In the fall of 1883, Metcalf moved to Paris to continue his studies in the ateliers of Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre at the Academie Julian. Metcalf was among the first American painters to visit Giverny, the French town cum art colony northwest of Paris that was the home of Claude Monet. But while other early American visitors to the Giverny art colony quickly absorbed the influence of Monet, the impact of Impressionism was not reflected in Metcalf's work until many years later.

Metcalf returned to America in 1888 and settled in New York the following year. His first experiments in Impressionism began on a summer trip to Gloucester in 1895, but this move was temporary, as he subsequently delved into mural painting and other projects. He finally committed himself fully to Impressionism in 1904, while he was staying with his parents in Clark's Cove, Maine. Metcalf referred to this period in Maine as "a partial renaissance," as he essentially redirected his career along new stylistic lines. He had his first solo exhibition in New York the following year, when he showed works from his Maine trip at the Fishel, Adler & Schwartz Gallery. Although he only sold four of the twenty-one paintings from that show, Metcalf's reputation as one of the leading American Impressionists rose rapidly thereafter.

Metcalf was an active member of the New York art community and nurtured close friendships with his colleagues. He was a founding member of The Ten American Painters, a breakaway group of modern painters, formed in 1897 in opposition to perceived over-commercialization of the Society of American artists, which itself had been founded twenty earlier in opposition to the conservatism of the National Academy of Design. The Ten consisted of Metcalf, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman (when Twachtman died in 1902, he was replaced by William Merritt Chase), Robert Reid, Frank Weston Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, and Edward Emerson Simmons, and they exhibited together annually.

Metcalf and Hassam were particularly close, and they often traveled and painted together throughout New England. It is not coincidental that the two artists were the most strongly identified as "Yankee," or New England painters during their own time. The thematic content of the works of the two artists differed significantly, however. While Hassam favored subjects that celebrated the Puritan heritage of New England culture, Metcalf studied the New England landscape itself and the way it changed over the seasons. William H. Gerdts noted the distinction between Metcalf's and Hassam's approach:

Yet it was Willard Metcalf who was recognized in his time as the preeminent Impressionist delineator of the region—the artist who captured, not as Hassam had, the spirit of Puritan New England, but who understood the landscape as distinctly American, as did no one else—the landscape that varied from the rolling hills of Connecticut and the scintillating New England shoreline from Connecticut to Maine, to villages nestled in its valleys in Vermont and New Hampshire, and to some of its stately homes and mansions throughout the region (Gerdts, "Willard Metcalf: Painter Laureate of New England Impressionism," in Willard Metcalf (1858–1925): Yankee Impressionist, exhib. cat. (New York: Spanierman Gallery, 2003), p. 61).

In 1903 Metcalf first visited Old Lyme, Connecticut, at the behest of Hassam, who had spent time there regularly since the mid-1890s. Armed with his new commitment to Impressionism, Metcalf returned there in 1905 for a longer stay, and again in 1906 and 1907. He painted some of his most important works at Old Lyme, including what is his best-known picture, May Night (1906, Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), a striking painting of Old Lyme doyenne Florence Griswold approaching her late-Georgian house by moonlight. May Night was included in an exhibition of Metcalf's work at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1906, where it caused a sensation and cemented Metcalf's reputation as one of the leading painters in America.

Metcalf's final visit to Old Lyme was in 1907. Metcalf cherished his solitude, and found the increasingly social environment of the Old Lyme colony a distraction. In search of a more remote winter destination, in February and March 1909 Metcalf stayed in Cornish, New Hampshire. This destination was the name given to an area that included a number of nearby small towns including Cornish, Plainfield, and nearby Windsor, Vermont, across the Connecticut River. Augustus Saint-Gaudens had arrived in Cornish in 1885, the avant-garde of what became a small and very sociable artists' colony that included such diverse artists as Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Kenyon Cox, and Charles Adams Platt. Metcalf, though excited to spend time with his friends and acquaintances in Cornish, came principally for the peaceful beauty of the off-season scenery, especially in winter.

It was undoubtedly in Vermont that Metcalf painted The Falls, based on sketches made at Brockways Mills. Located on the Williams River at the north end of the town of Rockingham, about five miles north of Bellows Falls, Vermont (see Rockingham Bicentennial Committee, Rockingham: A Pictorial History 1776–1976 (1975), p. 101, for an early twentieth-century photo taken from almost the same viewpoint), Brockways Mills (formerly, Lawrence Mills, the site of an early paper mill) is less than 20 miles south of Cornish, just west of the confluence of the Williams and Connecticut Rivers. Although the falls are still recognizable, the mill itself has been supplanted by a hydroplant, the bridge has been replaced, and the hillsides are overgrown with trees.