Willard Metcalf: Success

"May Night" by Willard Metcalf

"Willard Metcalf first stayed in Old Lyme for an extended time in 1905, and he returned in 1906 and 1907. He also worked for periods in other areas of Connecticut, most of them near Old Lyme - and he painted intensively. 

The version of 'November' done at Old Lyme is a good example of the kind of work that earned Metcalf a reputation as a painter of the changing seasons: a small stream flows quietly through a section of ground on which the browns, oranges, and yellows of the autumn leaves have fallen. The branches of a tree covered with yellow leaves hang over the stream. 'November' also exemplifies his use of a modified Impressionist style to express his feeling for nature and his keen sense of place. Here Metcalf, like Robert Frost, uses a part to represent the whole. There is something else as well: a hint of melancholy, perhaps, and conservatism. The colors of autumn are not obvious, not bright or garish - all yellow ocher and burnt sienna, no cadmium yellow or orange; and the reflections in the water mirror not the yellow leaves of the standing tree but the dark shapes of its branches.

In 1906 he exhibited again at the St. Botolph Club, hanging eighteen canvases that included 'May Night,' painted at Old Lyme that year. Most, if not all, the paintings had been done at Old Lyme in the past two years. 'May Night,' however, was the star of the show, even though it was 'different,' 'an uncommon subject,' as written in the 'Boston Herald.' And it was atypical: moonlight illuminates the pediment and columns of a late Georgian house as a rather ethereal-looking woman approaches the front portico. The woman - and to a certain extent the picture itself - feels more like Dewing than Metcalf. But it was popular, and it represented a turning point in his career. 

When Metcalf offered Miss Florence Griswold the painting to pay his bill, she refused. 'I won't take it,' she exclaimed. 'It's the best thing you've ever done.' So was the exhibition. The painter and critic Philip Hale, another Giverny colleague and teacher at the Museum School in Boston, summed up the show in a four-column feature story in the 'Boston Herald' on 18 November 1906, which praised Metcalf's 'vitality' and his 'freshness in point of view and a skill and breadth in handling that makes them remarkable.' Metcalf sold enough paintings to more than pay his debts to Ms. Griswold, then went to Maine to visit his parents for awhile." 

To be continued

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