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Lot Essay
Icebound Brook is a stunning example of Willard Leroy Metcalf’s lyrical American landscapes, transporting the viewer to a frosty winter day along a snow-covered stream. Born in Lowell, Massachusetts, in 1858, Metcalf demonstrates in his art a lifelong dedication to the New England landscape, and the present work is no exception.
In 1883, Metcalf sailed to France to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. Before his return to the United States in 1889, he made numerous trips to the artist’s colony at Giverny, where Claude Monet’s influence attracted a number of notable American Impressionists, including Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam and Theodore Butler, among others. While Metcalf’s attention to light, staccato brushstrokes and delicate palette all recall the painter’s time in Giverny, his scenes of the Northeastern landscape affirm his commitment to creating distinctly American Art.
Painted in 1922, the present work belongs to a group of paintings that Metcalf painted during a prolific February in Vermont. Metcalf "plodded heavily into the whiteness behind Lower Perkinsville's single road where the Black River, secretive in winter and somewhat ominously undisclosed, emerged—just here and there...In this general location he was to create two of the most distinguished pictures of his career: Icebound Brook [the present work], and...the breathtaking Northcountry," now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (E. de Veer, R.J. Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, New York, 1987, p. 137).
In 1883, Metcalf sailed to France to study at the Académie Julian in Paris. Before his return to the United States in 1889, he made numerous trips to the artist’s colony at Giverny, where Claude Monet’s influence attracted a number of notable American Impressionists, including Theodore Robinson, Childe Hassam and Theodore Butler, among others. While Metcalf’s attention to light, staccato brushstrokes and delicate palette all recall the painter’s time in Giverny, his scenes of the Northeastern landscape affirm his commitment to creating distinctly American Art.
Painted in 1922, the present work belongs to a group of paintings that Metcalf painted during a prolific February in Vermont. Metcalf "plodded heavily into the whiteness behind Lower Perkinsville's single road where the Black River, secretive in winter and somewhat ominously undisclosed, emerged—just here and there...In this general location he was to create two of the most distinguished pictures of his career: Icebound Brook [the present work], and...the breathtaking Northcountry," now in the collection of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York (E. de Veer, R.J. Boyle, Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf, New York, 1987, p. 137).