1. Willard Leroy Metcalf was an American painter born in Lowell, Massachusetts.
15 Facts About Willard Metcalf
1. 2.
Willard Metcalf studied at the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and later attended Academie Julian, Paris.
3.
Willard Metcalf was one of the Ten American Painters who in 1897 seceded from the Society of American Artists.
4.
Willard Metcalf left for Europe in September 1883, and did not return to the United States until late 1888.
5.
At the time Willard Metcalf led a lavish social life that included heavy drinking.
6.
In 1899 Willard Metcalf joined his friends Robert Reid and Edward Simmons in painting murals for a New York courthouse; in this genre he was no more successful than he had been as an illustrator and portraitist.
7.
In preparation for a mural commissioned by a tobacco company, Willard Metcalf traveled to Havana, Cuba in 1902, to make painted studies.
8.
Willard Metcalf's expertly handled, subtle views of the New England landscape met with steady critical and financial success.
9.
Willard Metcalf frequently visited the Cornish Art Colony, centered in the villages of Plainfield and Cornish, New Hampshire between 1909 and 1921, often during the quiet winter seasons when many of the colony's residents had returned to the city.
10.
In 1909, Louis Shipman, a playwright and husband of landscape architect Ellen Biddle Shipman, invited Willard Metcalf to join him for a winter in Plainfield, at his estate there, Brook Place.
11.
Willard Metcalf was good friends with colonist Charles Platt, on whose Cornish estate he honeymooned, with his second wife, Henriette Alice McCrea-Metcalf in 1911.
12.
Willard Metcalf continued to hold one-man shows in New York and Boston.
13.
In 1913 he spent nine months painting in Paris, Norway, England, and Italy; in the US, in addition to Cornish and Plainfield, New Hampshire, Willard Metcalf lived and painted in Connecticut, Vermont, and Maine, where in 1920 he painted Benediction, a nocturne.
14.
The Florence Griswold House, where Willard Metcalf visited and stayed in Old Lyme between 1905 and 1907, now houses the largest public collection of Willard Metcalf's paintings and personal artifacts.
15.
Willard Metcalf's ashes were scattered in Cornish, New Hampshire, by his longtime friend Charles Platt.