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Metcalf, Willard Leroy (American, 1858-1925) Oil Painting. Titled "Garden of Dreams". Oil on canvas. Signed lower left W.L Metcalf”and dated 1908. This work is illustrated (in black & white # 92) on p. 87 of the book by R.J. Boyle and Elizabeth de Veer titled Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalfe, Boston University and Abbeville Press, N.Y., 1987. The painting is in as found condition, has cupping and paint chip loss mostly in the upper section. The painting is from the Sagaponack, NY estate of writer Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014). Framed with the original period impressionist frame with gilt loss and separation at corners. Painting measures 24 inches x 23 inches. Frame measures 31 inches x 32 inches. Photos showing the painting inside of the home of Peter Matthiessens Long Island, New York estate will be included with the painting. From Askart: Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Willard Metcalf was a well-known East Coast Impressionist painter, teacher, and illustrator who also did painting in the Southwest. He was heralded in 1925 as the "poet laureate of the New England hills." He attended Lowell and Newton public schools, apprenticed to a wood engraver, and studied landscape painting with George Loring Brown. He attended the Boston Museum of Fine Arts and life classes at Lowell Institute. He did much work in the Southwest, and as early as 1881, was in Santa Fe. His illustrations of the Zuni Indians for Frank Cushing's ethnological studies appeared in "Century Magazine" in 1882 and 1883, and other Pueblo illustrations were in "Harper's Magazine." Sales from his illustration work financed Metcalf's travels in Europe from 1883 to 1889. He studied in Paris at the Julian Academy and was exposed primarily to traditional styles of painting until he visited Giverny, the home of Impressionist painter Claude Monet. Metcalf was perhaps the first American to arrive there. However, his word did not show much reflection of this new style until he went to Maine in 1903. From then, his painting, many of them seasonal landscapes, became more vibrant and atmospheric. His interest in Impressionism led him to become one of the founders of The Ten, a group of Boston and New York painters pioneering and promoting that style. He settled in New York City and worked as a magazine and book illustrator and teacher at Cooper Union and the Art Students League, but continued to visit the New England landscape and became one of the leading members of the Old Lyme Art Colony in Old Lyme, Connecticut. From Askart: Willard Leroy Metcalf (1858-1925). A leading American Impressionist and a member of the Ten American Painters, Willard Leroy Metcalf is best known for scenes of the hills and countryside of New England in which he merged a realist and an Impressionist approach. For his intimate and sweeping vistas of the rural locales that he knew so well, he was acclaimed as the "painter laureate of New England," and his direct and sincere works have been compared with the poems of Robert Frost. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, Metcalf was the son of a Civil War veteran and a violinist with the Boston Symphony orchestra. Like many American artists in the nineteenth century, he started his career as a wood engraver. His early studies consisted of evening classes at the Massachusetts Normal School in 1874 and at the Lowell Institute in 1875. In that year, he was also an apprentice to the landscape painter George Loring Brown (1814-1889), who instilled in him an awareness of the importance of draftsmanship. In 1876 Metcalf was awarded one of the first scholarships to the newly founded School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (later known as the Boston Museum School), where Thomas Wilmer Dewing was an early member of the faculty. Metcalf studied there from 1877 to 1879, primarily with William Rimmer (1816-1879). In the spring of 1881 Metcalf received what was probably his most important illustration commission. He accompanied the journalist Sylvester Baxter to the Southwest for Harper's to illustrate Baxter's article on the Zuni Indians. In June 1881 Metcalf met and painted the brilliant and controversial ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing (1857-1900), who would be photographed and painted by Thomas Eakins in 1895. By 1883 Metcalf had saved enough money to study in France, sailing there in September. In Paris Metcalf studied at the Acad?mie Julian under Gustave Boulanger and Jules Lefebvre, and made summer sojourns to the popular artists' colonies of Pont Aven, Grez-sur-Loing, and Giverny. Sunset at Grez (1884-85; Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden, Washington, D.C.), The Ten Cent Breakfast (1887; the Denver Art Museum, Colorado), and Mid-Summer Twilight, (1888; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.), are notable works of this period. In late 1886 and early 1887 Metcalf visited North Africa, where he painted striking light-filled scenes such as Arab Encampment, Biskra (private collection). A visit to Venice ensued. By 1889 Metcalf was back in the United States and living in New York, where he taught, created portraits, and produced illustrations. With the help of the architect, Stanford White, he was also commissioned for a number of paintings of Cuba from the Havana Tobacco Company for their New York store, designed by White, at Broadway and Twenty-Third Street. In 1896 Metcalf won the coveted Webb Prize at the Society of American Artists' Annual Exhibition with his painting, Gloucester Harbor (1895; Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts). In the following year, he became a member of the Ten American Painters, to whose exhibitions he would contribute until the group dissolved in 1923. In 1899 he painted two murals for the Appellate Court building in New York City. In 1903 he visited Old Lyme, Connecticut, for the first time. There he became a "peacemaker," mediating between the warring Tonalist and Impressionist camps. Abandoning Old Lyme in 1907, Metcalf spent a few peripatetic years. His art flourished, and works such as his graciously structured Flying Shadows (No. 2) (ca. 1909; private collection), with its hilly undulations marked by the linear accents of trees were worthy of such comments as that by a New York Evening Post critic who remarked of the artist that year: "No one has painted so much American scenery with so sensitive an eye to its variety, with so faithful an idiom, and with such scrupulous suppression of personal romanticisms and pictorial irrelevancies." Metcalf's remarriage in 1911 began a joyous phase in his career, and his two-month honeymoon in the artists' colony of Cornish, New Hampshire, resulted in a number of his finest works, several portraying the frozen Blow-Me-Down Brook. By 1915 Metcalf had two young children and was experiencing satisfaction and success in his personal life and in his career. In the 1920s, when many of his colleagues were either deceased or painting with diminished capacities, Metcalf continued to work with full strength. One critic, writing in 1925 of the last one-man show held in his lifetime, noted that his power had "steadily grown, so that his big landscapes with their background of mountains and their vast expanses of rolling valley and winding river are pulled together into coherence by skillful handling of values and subtle placing of accents." Metcalf's paintings may be found in many important private and public collections, including the Addison Gallery of American Art, Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts; the Art Institute of Chicago; Ball State University Museum of Art, Muncie, Indiana; the Butler Institute of American Art, Youngstown, Ohio; the Chrysler Museum of Art, Norfolk, Virginia; the Columbus Museum of Art, Ohio; the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the Cornish Colony Museum, New Hampshire; the Dallas Museum of Art, Texas; the Denver Art Museum; the Detroit Institute of Arts; the Florence Griswold Museum, Old Lyme, Connecticut; the Huntington Library and Gallery, San Marino, California; the Freer Collection, Washington, D.C.; the Mead Art Museum, Amherst, Massachusetts; the Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, Hanover, New Hampshire; the Memorial Art Gallery, University of Rochester, New York; the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York; the Mus?e d'Art Am?ricain, Giverny, France; the Museum of Art, Rhode Island School of Design, Providence; the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston; the National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C.; the New Britain Museum of American Art, Connecticut; the North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh; the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; the San Diego Museum of Art, California; the Sheldon Memorial Art Gallery, University of Nebraska, Lincoln; Smith College Museum of Art, Northampton, Massachusetts; the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D.C.; the Telfair Museum of Art, Savannah, Georgia; the Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago; the Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, Connecticut; Washington County Museum of Fine Arts, Hagerstown, Maryland; the White House, Washington, D.C.; and Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, Connecticut. Peter Matthiessen (May 22, 1927 ? April 5, 2014) was an American novelist, naturalist, wilderness writer and CIA agent. A co-founder of the literary magazine The Paris Review, he was a 2008 National Book Award winner. He was also a prominent environmental activist. His nonfiction featured nature and travel, notably The Snow Leopard (1978) and American Indian issues and history, such as a detailed and controversial study of the Leonard Peltier case, In the Spirit of Crazy Horse (1983). His fiction was adapted for film: the early story "Travelin' Man" was made into The Young One (1960) by Luis Bu?uel and the novel At Play in the Fields of the Lord (1965) into the 1991 film of the same name. In 2008, at age 81, Matthiessen received the National Book Award for Fiction for Shadow Country, a one-volume, 890-page revision of his three novels set in frontier Florida that had been published in the 1990s. According to critic Michael Dirda, "No one writes more lyrically [than Matthiessen] about animals or describes more movingly the spiritual experience of mountaintops, savannas, and the sea." Matthiessen was treated for acute leukemia for more than a year. His death came as he awaited publication of his final novel, In Paradise on April 8. After graduating from Yale in 1950, Matthiessen became engaged to Patsy Southgate, a Smith graduate whose father had been the chief of protocol in Roosevelt?s White House. Southgate was famously attractive and energetic. Matthiessen and Southgate had two children together. They divorced in 1956. In 1963 he married the writer Deborah Love. In his book The Snow Leopard, Matthiessen reported having had a somewhat tempestuous on-again off-again relationship with his wife Deborah, culminating in a deep commitment to each other made shortly before she was diagnosed with cancer. Matthiessen and Deborah practiced Zen Buddhism. She died in New York City near the end of 1972. In September of the following year came the field trip to Himalayan Nepal. Matthiessen later became a Buddhist priest of the White Plum Asanga. Before practicing Zen, Matthiessen was an early pioneer of LSD. He said his Buddhism evolved fairly naturally from his drug experiences. He argued that it was unfortunate that LSD had become outlawed over time, given its potentially beneficial effects as a spiritual and therapeutic tool (when administered with the right care and attention) and was critical of a figure such as Timothy Leary in terms of the long-term reputation of the drug. In 1980, Matthiessen married Maria Eckhart, born in Tanzania, in a Zen ceremony on Long Island, New York. They lived in Sagaponack, New York. In 2005, Matthiessen, along with Barry Lopez, Terry Tempest Williams, and James Galvin, was hailed in The Land's Wild Music by Mark Tredinnick, which analyzed how the landscape nourished and developed Matthiessen's writing.