Willard Leroy Metcalf

American, 1858 - 1925

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American artist (1858-1925)

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Moonlight bathes a grassy lawn, where a woman walks to a building with columns and a triangular roof in this vertical painting. To our left of center, the building glows white. The rest of the landscape is loosely painted with blended strokes, giving it a soft look and making some details difficult to make out. To our right, the woman has brown hair and wears a long white dress that trails on the shadow-dappled lawn. She approaches the front of the building, which has four steps as wide as the building that lead up to four columns. A form at the base of one of the columns suggests another woman wearing a full, white dress sitting at the top of the stairs. A half-round window, flat across the bottom, is dark in the center of the triangular pediment above. The left side of the building is mostly hidden behind tall bushes and a slender tree like a crape myrtle, which reaches off the top edge of the canvas. A dark orange glow is visible from a side window between the bushes, and soft yellow-white light reflects on the backs of the columns and the seated person at the front of the building. Dark blue-green trees stand beyond the building on the right, where a large flowering horse-chestnut tree there dominates the upper right corner of the painting. The sky is clear ocean blue with a handful of stars that show through. The paint is thinly applied so the texture of the canvas shows through in some areas. The artist signed and dated the painting in black in the lower left corner, “W. L. Metcalf 06.”
Willard Leroy Metcalf, May Night, 1906, oil on canvas, Corcoran Collection (Museum Purchase, Gallery Fund), 2014.136.6

May Night

Willard Leroy Metcalf · 1906 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  2014.136.6

We look down at and across a sun-soaked landscape with tile-roofed, white-stucco buildings and plowed fields in this horizontal painting. Slate-blue shadows cast by trees behind us shade a triangular, grassy outcropping in the lower left corner of the painting. The front edge of the outcropping faces away from us and is lined with gray boulders, perhaps a retaining wall. The land must dip steeply down beyond the boulders, for we look down onto the canopies of the trees lining the wall and the houses tucked up against the ridge. A few white birds fly among the terracotta-red roofs below us. Green fields roll back to more structures near a tree line to our left. The horizon comes about three-quarters of the way up the composition, and a few thin clouds skim across the sliver of opal-blue sky above. A peach-colored full moon rises low on the horizon in the left center of the sky. Visible dabs of paint and brushstrokes mimic the stucco on the buildings, the texture of the leaves, and the sweeping fields. The artist signed the painting with black paint in the lower left corner: “W. L. METCALF.”
Willard Leroy Metcalf, Midsummer Twilight, c. 1890, oil on canvas, Gift of Admiral Neill Phillips in memory of Grace Hendrick Phillips, 1976.50.2

Midsummer Twilight

Willard Leroy Metcalf · c. 1890 · oil on canvas ·  Accession ID  1976.50.2

Bibliography

1987

  • De Veer, Elizabeth, and Richard J. Boyle. Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf. New York, 1987.

1998

  • Torchia, Robert Wilson, with Deborah Chotner and Ellen G. Miles. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part II. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1998: 7-8.