Presented by Florence Griswold Museum

Metcalf had his first art training from a wood engraver in Boston in the mid-1870s, then from George Loring Brown, a painter trained in and respectful of the great traditions in European art. Later Metcalf studied at the new art school of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston. He illustrated an article for Harper’s with sketches of the Zuni Indians, whom he had observed and sketched the previous year on a trip to the Southwest. In 1883 he illustrated a three-part essay Frank Cushing, a Smithsonian ethno-anthropologist, had written about the Zunis for Century Magazine. In the fall of 1883 Metcalf went to the Academie Julian, Paris, where he worked under Boulanger and Lefebvre. He visited Tunis and Morocco in 1887 and in 1888 exhibited at the Paris Salon, receiving an honorable mention for The Arab Market. Then he returned to the United States, where he was given a one-man exhibition at the St. Botolph Club in Boston in 1889. In New York he taught first at the Art Students League for a year and then, for ten years, at the Cooper Union. He was a founder of the Ten American Painters. He not only exhibited with The Ten but, like many other artists then, contributed to major expositions of the period, such as the World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago in 1893, where he won a medal. By May of 1905, Metcalf was in Old Lyme, "working hard," his friend Childe Hassam wrote to J. Alden Weir. Hassam was surely the reason Metcalf went to Old Lyme, but, once there, he quickly became a leading figure himself. The following winter Fishel, Adler, and Schwartz exhibited "12 landscapes painted in oil during the past summer at Lyme, Connecticut." The summer of 1906 Metcalf was again in Old Lyme and did a moonlit view of the Griswold House that became his best known work, May Night. He returned that fall, telling Miss Florence he wanted to do more work before snow flew. Snow came while he was still there, however, and he painted a few fine snow scenes. An exhibition that winter at the St. Botolph Club was a breakthrough – a near sellout. That success and a prize from the Corcoran Gallery in Washington for May Night assured Metcalf’s future.