Willard LeRoy Metcalf
Willard LeRoy Metcalf
1858 - 1925
American painter and illustrator. His formal education was limited, and at 17 he was apprenticed to the painter George Loring Brown of Boston. He was one of the first scholarship students admitted to the school of art sponsored by the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and took classes there in 1877 and 1878. After spending several years illustrating magazine articles on the Zuni Indians of New Mexico, he decided to study abroad and in 1883 left for Paris. There he studied at the Académie Julian under Jules Lefebvre and Gustave Boulanger. During the five years he spent in France he became intimately acquainted with the countryside around the villages of Grez-sur-Loing and Giverny. He returned to America in 1888 and in the following spring exhibited oil studies executed in France, England and Africa at the St Botolph Club in Boston (e.g. Street Scene, Tunis, 1887; Worcester, MA, A. Mus.)
In 1890 Metcalf settled in New York, working as an illustrator for Harper’s, Century Magazine and Scribner’s. He taught at the Cooper Union and the Art Students League. In 1897 he drafted a declaration of independence from the Society of Academic Artists and was thenceforth identified—along with John H. Twachtman, Childe Hassam and William Merritt Chase—as one of the TEN AMERICAN PAINTERS. He executed two murals in an academic style, Justice and the Banishment of Discord, for the Appellate Court of New York in 1899. In the early 1900s Metcalf spent the summers working at the artists’ colony in Old Lyme, CT. He was strongly influenced by Impressionism, and his works from this period are characterized by loose brushwork and subtle colours. In 1907 May Night (1906; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.) won the first gold medal awarded by the Corcoran Gallery of Art. In 1922 he began a series of ambitious large-scale paintings of the New England landscape, including The Northcountry (1923; New York, Met.). He was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1924. [Francis Murphy. "Metcalf, Willard Leroy." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 9, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T057455.]
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