Willard Metcalf: Winter Paintings

"Hush of Winter" by Willard Metcalf

"Some of Willard Metcalf's more outstanding paintings of the Cornish period include - besides 'Icebound' and 'The White Veil,' both from 1909 - 'Blow-Me-Down,' and 'The Village' - 'September Morning' (both 1911), one of those views of a typical New England village, all clapboard and white, dominated by the church steeple and contrasting with the blue of the sky and the green of the foliage; three very special winter scenes - 'The Hush of Winter,' 'Cornish Hills,' and 'Thawing Brook (No. 1),' all painted in 1911; and an exquisite, somewhat decorative winter picture called 'The White Pasture,' painted in 1917 and bought by Charles Lang Freer for his new gallery in Washington, D.C. 

Through his masterly handling of paint, his sensitive orchestration of tone and color, the nuances of white, and his emphasis on the warm side of color temperature, Metcalf creates in 'The Hush of Winter,' a scene that leaves no doubt of the time of year but also has a sense of warmth and intimacy. It is as though Metcalf has implied that, along with Robert Frost in the post's 'A Winter Eden,' 'an hour of winter day might seem too short.' 

The correspondences between Frost and Metcalf, in both style and personal circumstances, are many and inescapable. Both had an unaffected, straightforward and deceptively simple style. Both conveyed a strong and convincing sense of place, both responded positively to the natural world, especially to New England, and both received delayed recognition. When Metcalf first came to the Cornish region, Frost was working on a farm near Derry, New Hampshire. Frost won his first Pulitzer Prize in 1924 for his book of poetry entitled 'New Hampshire,' and Metcalf earned the title 'poet laureate of the New England hills' for the paintings he did in Cornish and later in Chester, Vermont, and was elected to the Academy of Arts and Letters."

To be continued

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