Willard Metcalf: European Experience

"Sunset at Gréz" by Willard Metcalf

"In 1883 Willard Metcalf finally realized his ambition to study in Europe. He had accumulated enough money through his work as an illustrator after a second trip to the Zuni country of New Mexico, and he arrived in Liverpool on 5 September. On the train to London, he noted in his diary that the English landscape was 'beyond description,' so beautiful that 'I could hardly keep my seat!' In the countryside he may have sensed similarities to bits of New England and noticed the greater intimacies - the softly formed, understated hills illuminated by a light at once less harsh and less defining of form than its New England counterpart. Certainly, it was a quality of light far different from what he had seen in New Mexico. 

Metcalf paid more than one visit to the National Gallery in Trafalgar Square, then as now one of the world's great museum. But no matter how fascinating the city was he soon made his way to Paris, in time for the October session at the Académie Julian, where he knuckled down to the rigors of the French academic system.

Although American artists had studied abroad since Benjamin West took a studio in London in the eighteenth century, in Metcalf's day they all flocked to Paris. It was the most cosmopolitan city in Europe and bore the marks of Napoleon's Second Empire - Baron Haussmann's celebrated boulevards, Garnier's Opera House, the famous department stores, and the network of railroads connecting all of France with its capital. For the artist there were more private galleries than in any other city on the continent, as well as the Louvre and the Luxembourg, but Metcalf had come, above all, for art instruction, the most thorough and professional in the world."

To be continued

(Excerpt from "Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf" by  Elizabeth de Veer and Richard J. Boyle.)