Arts and Letters

Willard Metcalf was elected to the Academy on November 20th, 1924. He died in New York City on March 9th, 1925. It was thus for only a short time that he was possessed of a chair in this institution. But he was all his life long governed by the spirit of the Academy, the spirit of fidelity to sound standards. This was a leading source of the success he won as a member of the American school of landscape painting.

He was born at Lowell, Mass., in 1858 and received his earliest training in the school of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. The master in that city whose name he loved to recall was George L. Brown, whose paintings had once a high repute. Better even than his work was Brown's teaching. I well remember Metcalf's talk about it. He served something like an apprenticeship under Brown. It was his business to keep the studio in order, to tend the fire and so on. It was in a true workshop that he was reared and it was a place in which discipline was constantly operative. It was intensified when master and pupil went out along the countryside in search of subjects. Brown would teach the lad the essential, constructive elements in his profession. Composition was dwelt upon, the real building of a picture. Most of all did he teach Metcalf the importance of the minutiae of form in trees, shrubs, and the earth itself, the shapes and densities of clouds, the structure, in short, of the visible world. He insisted upon all these things being clearly seen and truthfully drawn. By the time Brown got through with him Metcalf was nothing if not an accurate observer and a skilled draughtsman. He knew thenceforth how to put a picture together and how to leave upon it the stamp of a peculiarly efficient craftsmanship.

In his boyhood he had developed traits which stood him in good stead at this time. He was a resolute bird's nester, which I know meant in his case a positive passion not only for the eggs he found but for the songs and other characteristics of birds. He cared for nature instinctively and in the years of his prime, when fishing was his favorite sport, half his pleasure in woods and streams was in what he saw, in the feel and fragrance of the natural world. All this was carried into his art. He painted landscape with a deep sympathy. He was not a dreamer. He never poetized or romanticized his subject. But with sensitiveness, with insight, he plucked the heart out of the scene he set himself to depict. The indefinable elements which make our brooks and pastures intensely and unforgettably American are curiously eloquent in his pictures. He would do more than paint the portrait of a place. He would so interpret it that it disclosed the essence of our countryside everywhere. I know of no painter in the American school, save Twachtman, who could so consummately capture the beauty of a snowy day. The things that so many Americans know in their childhood and always remember, the physiognomy of an old barn, the rise and fall of a rail fence, the grace of the birch and the magic of the maple in spring, he would set upon canvas with the raciness that Lowell achieves in his verse, with the raciness if not, as I have said, with the specifically poetic touch.

By some strange play of circumstance, the secret of which I have never been able to discover, Metcalf started life more as a painter of the figure than as a painter of landscape. He proceeded to Paris, where he studied under Boulanger and Lefebvre. They confirmed him in his habit of good draughtsmanship and formed him in the mode of sophisticated picture making which we associate with the Salon. I have a vague recollection of an interior with a sorrowing figure that he painted in this phase of his career. It was a capable but not otherwise a particularly interesting performance. When he was at work in the eighties he did not give any very clear sign that he would detach himself from the general company of clever Americans benefitted by French training. Nor, for that matter, did he give immediate tokens of high accomplishment when he turned to landscape. When the group of artists calling themselves the Ten American Painters was formed he was a creditable rather than a salient member. But gradually he got into his stride, and with a steadiness in progress that was remarkable in itself he presently arrived at positive triumphs.

The old virtues inculcated by Brown made themselves felt with increased force and he profited enormously by the impressionistic hypothesis, never becoming a crass disciple of Monet but giving more and more attention to problems of light and air. In the transitional period leading up to his mastery of those problems he especially impressed his friends by the ardent industry and the inner energy of his labors. He would leave the city as for a campaign and bring back his sheaves with something of the air of a fighter who had conquered another step in his march. Year after year the quality of his art rose higher and higher. If ever a man had the principle of growth in him it was Metcalf. Long before he died he had made himself one of the most authoritative as well as one of the most charming celebrants of the American scene. I return with special appreciation to the Americanism of his art, to the sincerity and force with which he put familiar motives before us. He got into his canvases the simple, lovable truths which, perhaps, only an American can feel to the uttermost in our apple trees and our winding streams. This clairvoyance it was that made him of the line of George Inness, which is to say an inheritor of the very essence of American art.

He did his work—let us remember with a peculiar gratitude—with a magnificent honesty. None of the freakish movements in modern art could ever touch him. In design, in color, in drawing, he was, if I may use the expression, on the side of the angels. He believed in good workmanship and he practised it. There was always something tonic, something even austere, about his endearing personality. It was his artistic integrity showing through. He will be remembered as a painter of great gifts. Also he will be remembered as an artist who had principles and stood up for them.