Metcalf

Last week, Death came to Willard L. Metcalf, famed artist. He succumbed to a heart attack while sitting at breakfast in his Manhattan studio.

Willard Metcalf, 66, was born in Lowell, Mass., apprenticed when 17 to a wood-engraver, later to one George L. Brown, landscape artist of South Boston, in whose service he got up at six o'clock, walked ten miles to work, swept out the studio, built the fire. Saving his pennies, he got together enough to go to Paris where, it is said, he lived on "three cents a day" studying under Boulanger and Lefebvre. Occasionally he sold a picture. In 1888, one of his paintings was hung in the Salon. Tired of his poverty, he left Paris, became a magazine illustrator in Manhattan-- an occupation which brought him fame and plenty of money. When he was 40, he renounced illustrating, went to Maine and spent a year in solitude, painting continually.

For the last ten years, even his smallest canvases have brought not less than $2,000. His Benediction-- the painting of an old New England meetinghouse at Kennebunkport, Me., standing, proud and sombre, in the moon's white downpour-- sold for $13,000. Always it was the New England scene that attracted him-- meagre pastures fenced with stones, the delicate austerity of brown fields, sparse uplands, the monotones of spring and fall, the blue, flinty shadows of snow. His painting, like his life, was in the best U. S. tradition.