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Willard Leroy Metcalf was an American artist 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.
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. Soon thereafter he traveled to Algeria and Tunisia, returning to Giverny in the summers of 1887 and 1888, in the company of other American painters.
Upon his return to the United States Metcalf had a solo exhibition at the St. Botolph Club in Boston. After living briefly in Philadelphia, in 1890 he opened a studio in New York, working for several years as a portrait painter, illustrator, and teacher. In 1895 he painted at Gloucester, Massachusetts, and ceased to work as an illustrator. In the late 1890s he appears to have painted little, and his contributions to the first few exhibitions of The Ten were disappointing. At the time Metcalf led a lavish social life that included heavy drinking.
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 preparation for a mural commissioned by a tobacco company, Metcalf traveled to Havana, Cuba in 1902, to make painted studies. That year he also produced a series of notable landscapes, including The Boat Landing and Battery Park-Spring. These works were characterized by a new freshness of execution and lightness of palette. 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.
In 1907 May Night (Corcoran Gallery of Art) won the Corcoran gold medal, was honored with the top purchase prize of $3,000, and was the first contemporary American painting to be bought by that institution. It remains one of best works and is now in the collections 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.
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. 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.
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, Henrietta Alice McCrea in 1911. Varying year to year, he stayed with the Shipmans, or a converted grist mill close to the village of Plainfield. His frequent Cornish muse was Blow-me-down Brook, a small creek which runs through the area, and passed along his residence. Others depict the hills, the Shipman residence or other country buildings. His production in Cornish exemplified and elevated his reputation for painting modest and intimate scenery of the changing seasons, elements which are represented in his work from the time. The pieces he produced in the Cornish area brought an unusual time of social, critical and commercial success in his life, so often filled with personal tumult. His paintings were compared with the poetry of Robert Frost, Walt Whitman, and other writers, earning him a reputation, in the words of one critic, as the "poet laureate of the New England hills."

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Gloucester Harbor

The Golden Carnival

indian summer vermont

Winter in New Hampshire

Ebb Tide

Nut Gathering

Summer Night (No. 2)

Buds And Blossoms

Poppy Garden

Budding Oak

The Sunny Brook, Chester, Vermont

Moonlight

October

Autum Glory

The Path

Inner Harbour, Gloucester

November Mist

My Wife and Daughter

Child in Sunlight

Tea on the Porch

Lenghtening Shadows

Ten Cent Breakfast

Hauling Wood - Winter

Old Woman with Child and Goose

The Landing Place

Captain Lord House, Kennebunkport, Maine

Returning Tide

Mountain Laurel

Dogwood Blossoms

Landscape

October Morning, Deerfield

Early October

Early Autumn

Green Idleness

Cornish Hills

A Family of Birches

Johnny Cake Hill

The Lily Pond

The Poppy Field

Winter Afternoon

summer night no. -

The Golden Screen

Dogwood Blossoms (No. 1)

The Last Snow

Sunset Hour on the West Lagoon, World Columbian Exposition 1893

Morning Shadows

Approaching Autumn

Havana Cathedral

Goose Girl

York, Maine

The Red Oak (no.2)

Closing Autumn

Ebbing Tide, Version Two

Poppy Field, Giverny

October Morning

October Sunshine

Prelude

The Little White House

The Falls

Flying Shadows

The Approaching Festival

October Morning

Old Mill, Pelago, Italy

Summer Night No. 3

Mountain Lakes, Olden, Norwas

June Pastoral

Kalmia

Icebound Brook (also known as Winter's Mantle)

Boys Fishing

Thawing Brook No.2

Passing Summer

Snow in Mountains

Hillside Pastures

Early Spring Afternoon, Central park

The Passing Glory

Vermont Hills, November

Road To Cape Porpoise

Summer at Hadlyme

September

The Frozen Pool, March

The Winter's Festival

Valley of the Mugnone

Maytime

The Red Maple

The River Epte, Giverny

Monet's Formal Garden

Thawing Brook 1

Battery Park - Spring

The White Lilacs

The Ballet Dancers (Aka The Dressing Room)

Midsummer Twilight

May Night

Cap Ferrat, marina Saint Jean

Maytime

The Pool

Laurel Woods

September Morning, Plainfield, New Hampshire

Reflections at Grez sur Loing

Autumn Roadside

Late Afternoon in October

Close of Day on the Maine Shore

Spring in the Valley

Giverny

By The Shore, Walberswick

The Poppy Garden

Young Birches in October

The Village- September Morning

Purple and Gold

Waning Summer

October Morning No. 1

Hillside Pasture

Pasture, Old Lyme

Spring Study of Reeds in Chadwick's Garden at Grèz

The Bower

The Picnic

Thawing Brook

The Golden Hour

Swollen Brook (No. 2)

May Afternoon

September Morning, Plainfield, New Hampshire

The Trout Pool, November

Poor Little Bloticelli

Landscape. The River

May Pastoral

Red Maple

On the Suffolk Coast

The Village in Late Spring

Pottery Shop at Tunis

Le Sillon

Sunlight and Shadow

October Afternoon, Vermont

Salmon River, Norway

Purple, White and Gold

Pont Royal

Haystacks at Sunset

Springtime along the River

Early Spring, Old Lyme

Giverny

Willows in March

Great Diamond Island

Joyous Maytime

Fall

Sunset at Grez

The Breath Of Autumn (Waterford, Connecticut)

Willow Road, Brunswick, Maine

The Red Bridge

The Trout Brook

Midsummer Shadows

Late Afternoon, March

Sandy Hollow, Manchaset

The Twin Birches

Spring at Leete's Island

Spring Planting

A Summer's Night

Hudson River in February

Coast of Maine

Green Canopy

The Jetty

Ballet Dancers

Venice

Unfolding Buds

Moonlight, Kittery Maine

ndian Summer, Vermont

Pelago, Tuscany

Souvenir de Printemps

Haystacks

Cafe at Biskra, Algiers

A View of the Village

First Blossoms

A Young Woman

First Sketch for 'White Mantle'

flying shadows

Late Afternoon, Manchester, Massachusetts

Breton Girl

Spring

Au Cafe

Grazing sheep on the coast of Maine

Farm Scene

Arab encampment, Biskra

Yellow House In A Country Landscape

thawing brook

The North Country

Icebound

Chase's House, New Hampshire

fish wharves gloucester

Hush of Winter

east boothbay harbor

On the Suffolk Coast

Street Scene, Tangiers

Last Snow

Inlet at East Boothbay Harbor

Mountain View from High Field

havana harbor

street scene tangiers

A View of the Village

The White Veil

Self-Portrait

The White Mantle

Suffolk Coast

The First Snow

Untitled (Tree)

The North Country

Hillside Pastures—September

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WillardLeroy Metcalf