Willard Metcalf: Boston

"Gloucester Harbor" by Willard Metcalf

"Willard Metcalf wrote his parents on 7 December 1888: 'I shall set sail on the Champagne from Havre on the 15th. It makes me later than expected, but still I shall be in time for Christmas, as I shall arrive in New York on the 23rd at the latest and will come at once to you.' After arriving home, he visited his former teacher, George Loring Brown. Portly and white-bearded, Brown was still at work, but on out-of-date and unsought canvases, a forecast of what would happen to Metcalf himself after his death. In January 1889 Edmund Tarbell and Frank Benson welcomed Metcalf back to Boston and to the studios at 145 Darmouth Street. At that time both Tarbell and Benson were teaching at the Boston Museum School. 

Number Two Newbury Street in Boston was then the location of the St. Botolph Club, founded in 1879, which offered Metcalf his first one-man exhibition on his return from Europe, and he prepared for the show at the Dartmouth Street studios. The Club's exhibitions made it an aesthetic center for the Boston area, and played a strong role in promoting American Impressionism by showing works by Hassam, Weir, Twachtman, Chase, and in 1889, paintings by Willard Metcalf. It also exhibited the work of DeCamp, Benson, and Tarbell, future colleagues of Metcalf in the Ten American Painters and members of what has come to be called the Boston School. In addition, the club presented the first exhibition of paintings by Monet outside of France in 1892.

Despite generally favorable reviews, Metcalf's exhibition of forty-four paintings did not do well financially, a condition that plagued him until about 1905. This was not surprising, since American collectors were not eager at the time to buy work by American artists. Nevertheless, the sale of 'Marché de Kousse-Kousse à Tunis,' the painting that garnered him an honorable mention at the Paris Salon, along with some portrait commissions, illustration assignments, and the generosity of Stanford White, who paid Metcalf's studio rent for a few years, enabled Metcalf to move to New York permanently in 1890."

To be continued

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