Willard LeRoy Metcalf

Estate of the artist, 1925
Milch Galleries, New York

New York, Milch Galleries, 1925

Canvas is not lined (but strip-lining along the edges). SURFACE: in good condition UNDER ULTRA VIOLET: a few small spots of inapainting scattered on lower half of painting--lower right, left and few dots/dashes at lower left (around signature, but don't affect it)
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“Mountain Pastures—Vermont”, was painted in 1924, a year before Metcalf’s death at 66.  By that time, the artist’s reputation as the quintessential American Impressionist painter of the New England landscape was fully established; critical and financial success was his.  And, though his fame had emerged over several decades, his last pictures, such as the present one, were considered among his finest. 

He was a naturalist at heart and the New England landscape was his passion from the start.  As a young man, he studied with the artist, George Loring Brown, roaming the countryside collecting birds’ eggs and nests in order to use them as props for the sake of accuracy and authenticity in his paintings.  This respect for truth and honesty was a basic principle that would define his work throughout his career. 

He traveled extensively to study art and each place he visited imparted a deeper, richer understanding of the landscape, its atmospheric effects, weather, the play of light and how to portray them with integrity.  His first trip was to the Southwest, where he was hired as a magazine illustrator to paint the Zuni tribe.  Then, in the early 1880s, he went to Europe where he started out with studies in Paris, but, being adventurous and anxious to learn more about the newer movements that were active in France, he visited many of the artists’ colonies—Grez-sur-Loing, Pont-Aven in Brittany and finally, became the first American artist to work in Giverny.  He also spent time in North Africa.  His years in Europe and particularly his exposure to French Impressionism exerted a strong and lasting influence.

When he returned to America, Metcalf brought with him all the sophisticated painterly techniques he had mastered, using them to develop an independent personal style that was straightforward, descriptive and imbued with a sense of place rather than any particular school or intellectual movement.  He became a founding member of ‘The Ten’, the influential society of American Impressionists that was founded in 1897 and consisted, for the most part, of the friends he had made in France including Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir and John Henry Twachtman who shared his love of New England.

His work gradually gained recognition.  After several years in New York and Boston spent as teacher, illustrator and even portraitist, his landscapes sold well enough that by 1905 he was able to live full-time in the countryside of New England --traveling constantly in search of the most meaningful spots in which to paint, whether in Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and finally, Vermont.

As the years in Europe receded, his landscapes showed less of their distinctly French influence.  Earlier, intimate scenes of the lush, New England countryside in spring and autumn rendered in brighter, high-keyed pastel colors gave way to a broader view of nature.  By the end of his life, Metcalf’s environments, while still painted with a consummate refinement and scrupulous attention to location, were more concerned with a broader, less detailed view of nature.  As in the present image, the landscape is reduced to an essential monumentality.  It is a larger vision.   Elizabeth de Veer writes of these late works, “In the last panoramic works, whether sweeping or small in scale, everything is softly solved at junctures.  Pockets in the earth are blurred with growth and slopes smudge with configurations of pine, birch or oak that accent the interacting diamond shapes.  Spontaneity triumphs over exacting Impressionist brushwork.” (Sunlight and Shadow:  The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, New York, 1987, p. 152).  In the present work, the focus is the monumental hillside itself, which takes up most of the picture plane.  Depth is achieved as the viewer’s eye is led up into the image through the elegant diagonals of a meandering river and above to where gently sloping hills touch the high horizon line, over which a brilliant blue sky provides contrast and brightness.  As always with Metcalf, there is the unmistakable sense of place; and never a doubt that this is a real hillside in Vermont.

Royal Cortissoz (1869-1948), the well-known critic of the New York Herald Tribune and champion of Metcalf’s work offered a remembrance of the artist, “I return with special appreciation of the Americanism of his art, to the sincerity and force with which he put familiar motives before us.  He got into his canvases the simple, lovable truth, which perhaps, only an American can feel to the uttermost in our apple trees and our winding streams…He did his work—let us remember with a peculiar gratitude—with a magnificent honesty.”  (Boyle et al., Willard Metcalf:  Yankee Impressionist, New York, 2003, p. 71)