Willard Metcalf: Principles

"Midsummer Twilight" by Willard Metcalf

"Willard Metcalf's Giverny experience, as well as those in Pont-Aven and Grèz, gave him a greater awareness of some of the specific problems of landscape painting and of how he wanted to resolve them. He did not want to give up a tonal value system entirely and replace it with one based upon hues alone, at least not at this time. Nor did he want to give up the use of drawing to describe form or to place an object in space. In effect, he was withholding a commitment to any single style or manner. Rather, through a maturing discernment of different approaches to interpreting landscape, he began to develop the sense of place that characterized his later work. He preferred to develop slowly, through careful analysis of a scene, to which he responded according to its inherent light, color, and texture. Metcalf began, however, like his friend John Twachtman, with a basic empathy for landscape.

One of the earliest American residents of Giverny, he was among the first to show the paintings he had done in France, when he returned to the United States. In 1889 Metcalf and Theodore Wendel, a fellow Givernyite (and Duveneck Boy), exhibited their work in Boston, Wendel in his own studio and Metcalf at the St. Botolph Club. Public response to Metcalf's exhibition was positive. His conservative and rather independent brand of Impressionism promised to serve him sell with the critics and the public."

To be continued

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