Willard Leroy Metcalf (July 1, 1858March 9, 1925) was an American painter born in Lowell, Massachusetts. He studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later attended Académie Julian, Paris. After early figure-painting and illustration, he became prominent as a landscape painter. He was one of the Ten American Painters who in 1897 seceded from the Society of American Artists. For some years he was an instructor in the Women's Art School, Cooper Union, New York, and in the Art Students League, New York. In 1893 he became a member of the American Watercolor Society, New York. Generally associated with American Impressionism, he is also remembered for his New England landscapes and involvement with the Old Lyme Art Colony at Old Lyme, Connecticut and his influential years at the Cornish Art Colony.

Early years

Born into a working-class family, Metcalf began painting in 1874. In 1876 he opened a studio in Boston, and received a scholarship at the Boston Museum school, where he studied until 1878. In 1882 he held an exhibition at the J. Eastman Chase Gallery in Boston, the sales from which financed a study trip abroad.

Metcalf left for Europe in September 1883, and did not return to the United States until late 1888. During that time he traveled and painted, studying first in Paris with Gustave Boulanger and Jules-Joseph Lefebvre, subsequently going to England and Pont-Aven, Brittany. In the winter of 1884 he apparently met John Twachtman in Paris, and painted at Grez-sur-Loing alongside other American artists, including Theodore Robinson. His landscapes at this time were traditional renditions of peasant scenes, in the manner of Jean Millet. By 1886 Metcalf was painting in Giverny, evidently the first American painter to visit there.

In 1899 Metcalf joined his friends Robert Reid and Edward Simmons in painting murals for a New York courthouse; in this genre he was no more successful than he had been as an illustrator and portraitist. Metcalf's model for the murals was Marguerite Beaufort Hailé, a stage performer twenty years his junior, whom the artist would marry in 1903. In 1904 he resided and painted steadily in Clark's Cove, Maine. By 1905, at the encouragement of his friend Childe Hassam, he began summering in Old Lyme, working as both painter and teacher, and held successful exhibitions in New York and again at the St. Botolph Club. His expertly handled, subtle views of the New England landscape met with steady critical and financial success. It remains one of Metcalf's best known works and is now in the collection of the National Gallery of Art. In the same year his marriage to Marguerite dissolved when she eloped from Old Lyme with one of Metcalf's male students.

Cornish Art Colony

Metcalf frequently visited the Cornish Art Colony, centered in the villages of Plainfield and Cornish, New Hampshire between 1909 and 1921, often during the quiet winter seasons when many of the colony's residents had returned to the city. The colony stretched over gentle, open hills along the Connecticut River with views of Mount Ascutney in Vermont, a landscape which garnered it comparisons to Tuscany and a crop of Italianate summer homes. In 1909, Louis Shipman, a playwright and husband of landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman, invited Metcalf to join him for a winter in Plainfield, at his estate there, Brook Place.

thumb|left|My Wife and Daughter, Willard Metcalf, 1917

Metcalf would return faithfully for many winters, and at least one summer after that. He was good friends with colonist Charles Platt, on whose Cornish estate he honeymooned, with his second wife, Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf in 1911. A number of American museums have collected artworks by Metcalf, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the National Gallery of Art, the Art Institute of Chicago, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Philadelphia Museum of Art, the De Young Museum, the Detroit Institute of Arts, the Freer Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Baltimore Museum of Art, the Worcester Art Museum, the Ruth Chandler Williamson Gallery at Scripps College, the Library of Congress, the Amon Carter Museum of American Art, the Dallas Museum of Art, the Terra Foundation for American Art, Colby College Museum of Art, Yale University Art Gallery, Mead Art Museum at Amherst College, Historic Deerfield, Smith College Museum of Art, and the Seattle Art Museum. Works also appear in international collections, such as Madrid's Thyssen-Bornemisza Museum.

His ashes were scattered in Cornish, New Hampshire, by his longtime friend Charles Platt.

thumb|200px|Indian Summer, Vermont, oil on canvas, 1922. [[Dallas Museum of Art]]

Notable works

Summer Morning, Giverny (c. 1888), sold at Christie's for $422,500 in 2010

Midsummer Twilight (c. 1890, France), at the National Gallery of Art

May Night (1906), at the National Gallery of Art, painted in Old Lyme

The White Veil (1909), Rhode Island School of Design Museum

  • He painted this in Plainfield by the Shipman house, and later created a second copy, The White Veil (no. 2), now at the Detroit Institute of Arts, upon return to New York. It was among his best winter landscapes and received critical praise at an exhibition with the Ten American Painters.

The Village- September Morning (1911), the Hevrdejs Collection, his only depiction of Plainfield Village