Willard Metcalf: The Ten American Painters

"The Red Oak" by Willard Metcalf

"Late in December 1897, Childe Hassam, along with Weir and Twachtman, resigned from the Society of American Artists. Metcalf and six other artists joined them to form a loosely knit independent exhibiting group, The Ten American Painters. Edward Simmons recalled its beginning in his autobiography: 'The Ten American Painters was started quite by accident. We never called ourselves the 'Ten'; in fact, we never called ourselves anything. We were just a group who wanted to make a showing and left the Society as a protest against big exhibits. At our first exhibition at the the Durand-Ruel's Gallery we merely put out the sign 'Show of Ten American Painters' and it was the reporters and critics speaking of us who gave us the name.'

The Ten were dissatisfied with the vast, mediocre, overcrowded installations of the Society's annual exhibitions and that it had become just as conservative as the National Academy that it had broken from in 1877. The seceding artists [who included Frank Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Joseph DeCamp, Thomas Dewing, Robert Reid, Edward Simmons and even Abbott Thayer who joined only briefly, backing out before the first exhibition] grew dissatisfied with their membership in a large body which is governed by form and tradition, and having sympathetic tastes in a certain direction in art."

After their opening at Durand-Ruel the group exhibited annually in New York, most often at that gallery or at the Montross Gallery, and sometimes the exhibitions traveled to the St. Botolph Club in Boston. There were no officers in the organization, and there was no jury. Each man received an equal amount of space, and each artist's work was arranged by the artist himself and 'hung on the line,' with plenty of room in between. The press was generally favorable, even though some of the critics expected a more rebellious art. One of them even seemed disappointed that the show was good only because of the 'intrinsic quality' of the work! These exhibitions were to be a forum for Metcalf's work for the next twenty years."

To be continued

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