Willard Metcalf: Cornish, New Hampshire

"Cornish Hills" by Willard Metcalf

"Willard Metcalf wanted to go farther north, where the snow season was longer. 'Evening,' wrote Stephen Parrish in his diary of 3 March 1909, 'to...dinner. The Shipmans and Metcalf the painter.' Stephen Parrish and his son, Maxfield, the famous illustrator, lived in Cornish, New Hampshire, which Metcalf began to paint in February and March 1909. The countryside around Cornish became the subject of some of Metcalf's most direct, unaffected, and joyous paintings. Between 1909 and 1920 he returned to Cornish over and over again, and from it he later discovered the nearby region around Springfield and Chester, Vermont, the scene of his very last group of paintings. But while in Cornish, his work encompassed views of the Cornish hills, a landscape that includes Grantham Mountain, the Croyden mountains, and Blow-Me-Down Brook.

Unlike Old Lyme, Woodstock, New York City, Gloucester, or Taos, no single town or village was associated with the Cornish artists' colony. Rather, it consisted of artists' houses sprawled over the Cornish hills and scattered among the villages. Not far from a most impressive covered bridge, in 1885, Augustus Saint-Gaudens started the colony, and in the two decades he lived there, he produced about one hundred fifty sculptures.

 With Metcalf in Cornish were his friend the playwright Louis Shipman and his wife Ellen, who designed quite a few of the Cornish gardens, many of which had become famous; and the architect and painter Charles Adams Platt, whom Metcalf had met at the Académie Julian and who had designed the Freer Gallery. The painter and conservative critic Kenyon Cox had a house there; and Thomas Dewing rented a place during the summers, as did Will Ladd Taylor, one of Metcalf's oldest friends.

In addition, the colony included theater people, writers, and musicians, who engaged in what today would be called performance pieces but were then called 'masques.' It could get a bit too social, but Metcalf's interests were more professional, and unlike most of his Cornish colleagues, he preferred the winter to all the seasons he painted in that area. Yet there are probably more known Metcalf paintings of the seasons of the Cornish landscape at any time of the year than by any of the other members of the colony." 

To be continued

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