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Dimensions: measurements 29 1/4 by 33 1/2 in. alternate measurements (74.3 by 85.1 cm)
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Provenance: M. Knoedler & Co., New York
Milch Galleries, New York
Hirschl & Adler Galleries, New York
Private Collection, Tennessee (acquired from the above), 1971
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Exhibited: Chattanooga, Tennessee, Hunter Museum of Art, Willard Leroy Metcalf: A Retrospective, April-May 1977, no. 44, p. 7, illustrated p. 52
Greenwich, Connecticut, Bruce Museum of Arts and Science, American Impressionism: The Beauty of Work, September 2005-January 2006
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Literature: The International Studio, 1920s, illustrated
Elizabeth de Veer and Richard J. Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, New York, 1987, illustrated p. 248, fig. 292
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Notes: Painted in Woodbury, Connecticut.This painting will be included in the forthcoming Willard L. Metcalf catalogue raisonné authored by Dr. Bruce W. Chambers, Ira Spanierman, and Dr. William H. Gerdts.
Richard J. Boyle writes, "Although Metcalf touched on many of the reasons for painting landscape, he also had a true affinity for it, a genuine feeling. He traveled a great deal to find terrain to satisfy his sense of place, finding what suited him best in the countryside of New England ... it was just right for Metcalf, who marshaled his skills and used the formal qualities of his art to depict that landscape and convey what he felt was its essence. So, his sense of color and organization and his orchestration of tone as well as the abstract qualities of line and shape were directed toward that end, as would not be the case according to the modernist aesthetic....The landscape as subject was obviously very important to Metcalf: he used his thorough training and his considerable formal mastery to interpret it and to express what he felt was its primary truth" (Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, pp. 244-45). Mr. Boyle continues, "... absorbing his experience and influences and combining them with his independent point of view, he developed a distinctive style of his own. It was a form of Impressionism modified by his brand of restraint and his own sense of realism in the face of his response to the subject for which he had the most affinity ... Willard Metcalf became known as 'the poet laureate of the New England Hills" (Sunlight and Shadow, p. 235).
