Willard Metcalf: Walberswick & Giverny

"The Ten-Cent Breakfast" by Willard Metcalf

"After a winter at Julian's and painting at Gréz in the late winter and spring of 1886, Willard Metcalf decided to return to England. The year before he had learned of Walberswick, a small village on the Suffolk coast in East Anglia, with an atmosphere unlike any of the other Suffolk coastal towns. Walberswick was something of an artists' colony, mostly of British painters. Perhaps its air of timelessness, along with the stillness and quiet loneliness of the surrounding marsh, the sea, and the heathlands to the north, attracted artists and naturalists, and Metcalf really was both. The places where he painted in 1885 are not much changed. Much of the area surrounding the town has been designated a National Nature Reserve, one of the reasons why it was not difficult to find the sites of Metcalf's paintings.

At summer's end Metcalf returned to France and continued to alternate between Julian's and Gréz. At Gréz he returned again to a more conservative style of plein-air painting. Along with his friend Childe Hassam, he sent paintings to the January exhibition of the Paint and Clay Club in Boston.  

In 1886 Metcalf seems to have made his first extended stay in Giverny, through which he had passed the year before. If Paris was Mecca for pursuing the art of painting, Giverny was Mecca for pursuing the Impressionist vision. It was a later colony than Pont-Aven and Concarneau, and although Americans 'flocked there in droves,' it had its small group of expat pioneers: Theodore Robinson, John Leslie Breck, Louis Ritter, Theodore Wendel, the Canadian painter Blair Bruce, as well as the first, Willard Metcalf. 

Metcalf's little painting 'The Ten Cent Breakfast,' inscribed 'Giverny, 1887' is an interesting record of the his friends also present in Giverny. There is Robert Louis Stevenson reading 'Le Petit Journal,' Theodore Robinson at the far end of the table, John Twachtman seated to the right of the lamp, and behind him a figure whose identity remains unknown."

To be continued

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