Willard Metcalf: The Museum of Fine Arts Boston

"Sunlight and Shadow" by Willard Metcalf

"When the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston was founded the trustees fulfilled their obligation to afford 'instruction in the Fine Arts' by established Boston's first true art school. Before that there was individualized instruction from such artists as George Loring Brown and William Morris Hunt, and the anatomy classes taught by William Rimmer. Official schools, such as the Lowell Institute and the State Normal Art School, both of which Metcalf attended, were not so much dedicated to training professional artists as to teaching the more practical aspects of design and to training art teachers for the public schools.

At first, not even the Boston Museum School concerned itself with training professionals. Its goal was to guide and influence 'public taste' by creating 'a body of intelligent and instructed amateurs.' But that soon changed. From an initial enrollment of eighty students - Willard Metcalf among them - with a faculty that included William Rimmer and Thomas Dewing, the Museum School became Boston's most vital art institution. Through later faculty members, such as Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson - who became Metcalf's colleagues in the Ten American Painters - the Museum School developed a style that ultimately was identified with Boston. 

Boston artist William Morris Hunt also turned the eyes of American students - including Metcalf - to Paris rather than Italy and began the long period of French influence on American painters. He not only admired the art in particular of his teachers Thomas Couture and Jean-François Millet, but had synthesized their styles in his own work, befriending them, supporting them, and bringing their paintings home to show in Boston. Intelligent and enthusiastic, Hunt was an excellent teacher, and he created an interest in and enthusiasm for the Barbizon painters even before they were accepted in France. 

Throughout Metcalf's development his admiration for Barbizon painting, particularly that of Millet and Corot, never wavered. The paintings he did from 1877 through 1879 in Vermont and Maine reflect that influence and interest, and he never entirely relinquished a feeling for this style. Both it and its philosophy continued to affect his work to the end of his life."

To be continued

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