November Mosaic
Artist
Willard Metcalf
(American, 1858 - 1925)
Date1922
MediumOil on canvas
Dimensions26 x 28 in. (66 x 71.1 cm)
Frame Dimension (height x width x depth): 36 7/8 × 39 3/4 × 2 in. (93.7 × 101 × 5.1 cm)
Frame Dimension (height x width x depth): 36 7/8 × 39 3/4 × 2 in. (93.7 × 101 × 5.1 cm)
ClassificationsOil Painting
Credit LineJohn Butler Talcott Fund
Terms
Object number1925.01
DescriptionWillard Metcalf's vision of "summerland", a world of perpetual sunshine and perfect repose, was not just another pretty concept; instead, it epitomized his spiritualist notion of the afterlife. Despite his own troubled adulthood (which included two divorces and a history of alcoholic binges), Metcalf held to this ideal, which guided his career as America's foremost Impressionist landscape painters. According to his biographer, Elizabeth de Veer, Metcalf "could not conceive of a universe [that was] sublime or tawdry, awesome or merely ordinary." Rather, Metcalf's universe was "an expression of agreeable and very beautiful differences within a safe framework of predictability." (1) In a letter to his daughter Rosalind penned shortly before his death in 1925, Metcalf wrote that painting was:
An endless effort of putting paint on a canvas with a miserable little brush and endeavoring to make it express thoughts and dreams that will perhaps reach out and say something to someone, something that will make wandering souls stop and look, perhaps awaken something in them that may make them think of beautiful things and so perhaps happiness. Oh! my dear it's a long journey this painting game and such hard and continued effort demanded, if one has an ideal, such as I have, and the desire for perfection. (2)
The painting "November Mosaic", which embodies this idealism, dates to the prime of Metcalf's career and, like all his best paintings, depicts a seasonal New England landscape. One of Metcalf's favorite locations for exploring these themes was the stone village in Chester, Vermont, alongside the Little Williams River,the subject of this classic essay about an autumn afternoon.
Instead of a swift accumulation of colored brushstrokes such as one might find in the work of his Impressionist contemporaries William Merritt Chase and Edmund Tarbell, Metcalf selected a slower, more deliberate painting speed, hence the apt reference in the title to a "mosaic." Using classic compositional devices, such as crossing diagonals and crisp contrasts of texture and value, Metcalf quite literally and painstakingly constructed a scene of consummate serenity and solitude, creating a mood that one of his reviewers described at the time as "lyric in a positive, masculine style." (3)
BWC
Bibliography:
Bernard Teevan, "A Painter's Renaissance," "International Studio" 82 (October 1925): 3 11; Francis X. Murphy, "Willard Leroy Metcalf, A Retrospective" (Springfield, Mass.: Museum of Fine Arts, 1976); Elizabeth G. de Veer and Richard Boyle, "Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf" (New York: Abbeville Press, 1987).
NOTES:
1 . Elizabeth G. de Veer, "Metcalf," unpublished ms., chap. 18, p. 502, author's copy.
2. Quoted in ibid., p. 511.
3."Metcalf's Landscapes," "Art News" 22 (February 23, 1924): 3.
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