Willard Leroy Metcalf was born in 1858 in Lowell, Massachusetts, the only child of Greenleaf W. Metcalf and Margaret Jane Gallop Metcalf. The family, with roots in Maine, moved from Lowell to Maine, then to Newton, Massachusetts, and finally to Cambridgeport. After beginning his working life at a Boston hardware store, Metcalf apprenticed to a wood engraver and took night classes at the Massachusetts Normal Art School. In 1875, he was recommended by a family friend for an apprenticeship with Boston artist George Loring Brown (1814–1889). He remained with Brown from March 1875 until April 1876, while also studying at night at the Lowell Institute. In December 1876, Metcalf received a full scholarship at the about-to-open School of Art at the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. Though Metcalf, at times, had a strained relationship with Brown, disdaining Brown’s Italianate landscapes, he later credited Brown for the rigor of that early instruction.
The first 25 years of Willard Metcalf’s professional career contains scenarios familiar to those who follow artists’ biographies. He exhibited widely, traveled to Paris, socialized with fellow artists, and maintained a series of studios. Initially Metcalf supported himself with work as an illustrator. From 1881 to 1883 he lived among the Zuni Indians in the Southwest, accompanying the pioneering Smithsonian anthropologist Frank Cushing and making illustrations of their life for Harper’s, Century, and Survey magazines. He joined Cushing in advocating for Zuni water rights in Washington and was made an honorary member of the tribe. Metcalf saved enough money from this work to go to Europe where he remained from 1883 through 1888. In Paris, he studied with Gustav Boulanger (1824–1890) and Jules LeFebvre (1836–1911) at the Académie Julian, punctuating his French stay with periodic fishing jaunts in England. (Metcalf was a lifelong fishing enthusiast. He was also a naturalist, collecting, identifying, and illustrating birds’ eggs.) Summers, he visited favorite artist destinations including Grez-sur-Loing, south of Paris near the forest of Fontainebleau, and Pont Aven in Brittany. In January 1887, he painted in North Africa. Metcalf was among the first Americans to “discover” Giverny, a scenic village 50 miles northwest of Paris near the eastern edge of Normandy. Its principal attraction was its most famous resident, Claude Monet. The common denominator among all of Metcalf’s destinations is their attraction and attractiveness to peripatetic artists, a pattern that continued after Metcalf left Europe for America. Metcalf was ever companionable and convivial, an active participant in the social milieu of a generation of young, aspiring, European-trained American artists. Metcalf’s best-known work from this period is The Ten Cent Breakfast (1887, Denver Art Museum), an interior genre figure painting showing four Americans at the Hôtel Baudy in Giverny, sometimes identified, from left to right as Metcalf himself, his artist friends, John Henry Twachtman and Theodore Robinson, and the writer Robert Louis Stevenson. (The picture is regarded as an accurate depiction of a moment in the life of young American artists in France, even though nothing about the famous image is settled: not its location, its personae or, its time of day. The wine on the table does not suggest breakfast.)
Exposed to a wide variety of styles of painting in Europe, Metcalf returned home in December 1888. His American career divides into an early period, roughly from 1888 through 1903 when he enjoyed moderate and sporadic success, and then his final triumph as the “Painter Laureate of New England Impressionism” from 1904 until his death in 1925. Thoroughly trained as a figure painter, Metcalf intended to establish himself as a portraitist. His early mentor was the architect and decorator, Stanford White (1853–1906), whom he may have met in Paris, introduced by their mutual friend John Henry Twachtman. Metcalf first went home to Boston, where an 1889 one-man show at the St. Botolph Club proved a commercial disappointment. Then, following White’s advice, Metcalf proceeded to Philadelphia, hoping to cultivate a circle of patrons among the affluent women of Philadelphia’s Main Line. By 1890, Metcalf was in New York, where White assisted Metcalf arranging work for him and initially paying his studio rent as well as dues for the Raquet and Tennis Club and The Players Club. The relationship with White was social as well, with Metcalf joining the architect and sculptor Augustus Saint-Gaudens (1848–1907) in their hard-drinking, fast-living social set. During the first half of the 1890s, Metcalf again turned to illustration to support himself. He also taught at the Women’s Art School of the Cooper Institute and the Art Students League. In 1894, he shared a studio with Robert Reid. In July 1895, he traveled to Gloucester, Massachusetts, on a painting trip with Childe Hassam (1859–1935), a friend since the two were young artists in Boston in the late 1870s. Metcalf’s Gloucester paintings marked his first return to landscape since 1883. Presumably influenced by Hassam, they document what would be a brief flirtation with impressionist technique. One of these, Gloucester Harbor (Mead Art Museum, Amherst College), won the Webb prize for the best landscape exhibited by an American artist under the age of 40 when Metcalf showed it at the 1896 exhibition of the Society of American Artists.
Through this period, Metcalf was an active member of the New York art community and nurtured close friendships with his colleagues. He was part of a group of friends who were increasingly dissatisfied with the exhibition opportunities for American painters trained in France and influenced by the impressionist style. In 1897, Metcalf was a founding member of The Ten American Painters, a breakaway group of modern painters, formed in opposition to perceived over-commercialization of the Society of American Artists, which itself had been founded twenty years earlier in opposition to the conservatism of the National Academy of Design. The Ten, comprising Metcalf, Childe Hassam, J. Alden Weir, John Henry Twachtman, Robert Reid, Frank Weston Benson, Edmund Tarbell, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, Joseph DeCamp, and Edward Emerson Simmons (after Twachtman died in 1902, he was replaced by William Merritt Chase in 1905), exhibited together annually in various configurations from 1898 to 1918. In 1900, Metcalf won an honorable mention for Midsummer Twilight (about 1890, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.) when he sent it to the Exposition Universelle in Paris. This was followed by a silver medal for the same picture at the Pan-American Buffalo Exposition in 1901. Metcalf’s personal life during this period was marked by periods of alcoholism, financial stress, frequent changes of address, and, in 1903 an ill-advised first marriage to Marguerite Beaufort Hailé, (1879–1961), a model with whom he had been living since 1899.
Willard Metcalf’s first experiments in Impressionism, begun on the 1895 summer trip to Gloucester with Childe Hassam, had proved fleeting, as he subsequently delved into mural painting and other projects. Metcalf and Hassam were particularly close, and they often traveled and painted together throughout New England. In the spring and summer of 1903, Metcalf joined Hassam in Old Lyme, Connecticut, in the de facto artists’ colony centered in the boarding house of Miss Florence Griswold. Griswold was the last of her family to live in a stately 1817 New England captain’s house. As the family fortune diminished the Griswolds turned their home, grown quite shabby over the years, into a girls’ school, and finally into a boarding house run by the surviving family member, fondly known as Miss Florence.
