Willard Leroy Metcalf

Often described as the man through whom Giverny became known to the painters of the Académie Julian.

Dates1858 — 1925
NationalityAmerican
DisciplinePainter
Place of birthLowell, Massachusetts, États-Unis

Biography

An American landscape painter trained in Boston and then Paris, Willard Leroy Metcalf was present in Giverny from the 1880s. Back in the United States, he developed a personal style that made him one of New England’s most recognised landscape painters.

Giverny

The Smithsonian American Art Museum names him the first American painter to stay in Giverny, in 1886. He returned in the summers of 1887 and 1888. There he painted poppy fields, haystacks, orchards and Norman lanes, before developing in the United States a personal style that made him one of New England’s most recognised landscape painters.

Relation with the Hôtel Baudy

This is the best-established link in the whole dossier. The Ten Cent Breakfast, which he signed “W. L. Metcalf-Giverny-1887”, depicts a scene in the dining room of the Hôtel Baudy: the Denver Art Museum, which holds the canvas, states this explicitly and adds that the standing man lighting his pipe may be Metcalf himself, without excluding other identifications. Local tradition further credits him with discovering the Baudys’ grocery-bar in spring 1886; that account, widely repeated, rests on no archival source.

Principal works