Midsummer Twilight

c. 1890

Willard Leroy Metcalf

Artist, American, 1858 - 1925

We look down at and across a sun-soaked landscape with tile-roofed, white-stucco buildings and plowed fields in this horizontal painting. Slate-blue shadows cast by trees behind us shade a triangular, grassy outcropping in the lower left corner of the painting. The front edge of the outcropping faces away from us and is lined with gray boulders, perhaps a retaining wall. The land must dip steeply down beyond the boulders, for we look down onto the canopies of the trees lining the wall and the houses tucked up against the ridge. A few white birds fly among the terracotta-red roofs below us. Green fields roll back to more structures near a tree line to our left. The horizon comes about three-quarters of the way up the composition, and a few thin clouds skim across the sliver of opal-blue sky above. A peach-colored full moon rises low on the horizon in the left center of the sky. Visible dabs of paint and brushstrokes mimic the stucco on the buildings, the texture of the leaves, and the sweeping fields. The artist signed the painting with black paint in the lower left corner: “W. L. METCALF.”

Media Options

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On View

West Building Main Floor, Gallery 70

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Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Purchased before 1900 by Henry Keney Pomeroy [1854-1925], New York and Simsbury, Connecticut; by inheritance to his niece, Grace Hendrick Eustis Phillips [d. 1966, Mrs. Neill Phillips]; her husband, Admiral Neill Phillips [d. 1974], Upperville, Virginia; gift 1976 to NGA.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1890

  • Twelfth Exhibition, Society of American Artists, New York, 1890, no. 128.

1893

  • World's Columbian Exposition, Department of Fine Arts, Chicago, 1893, no. 523.

1900

  • Fine Arts Exhibit of the United States of America, Exposition Universelle, Paris, 1900, no. 193, as Summer Twilight.

1901

  • Exhibition of Fine Arts, Pan-American Exposition, Buffalo, New York, 1901, no. 765.

1902

  • Seventy First Annual Exhibition, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, 1902, no. 322.

1982

  • Americans in Brittany and Normandy 1860-1910, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia; Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth; Phoenix Art Museum; National Museum of American Art, Washington, D.C., 1982-1983, no. 84.

1999

  • Paris 1900: 'The American School' at the Universal Exposition, Montclair Art Mus.; Mus. of Am. Art of the Penn. Acad. of the Fine Arts, Phil.; Columbus Mus. of Art; Elvehjem Mus. of Art, Univ. of Wisc., Madison, 1999-2001, no. 76, repro.

Bibliography

1980

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1980: 198, repro.

  • Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1980: 140, repro.

1981

  • Williams, William James. A Heritage of American Paintings from the National Gallery of Art. New York, 1981: 190, repro. 192.

1987

  • De Veer, Elizabeth, and Richard J. Boyle. Sunlight and Shadow: The Life and Art of Willard L. Metcalf. New York, 1987: 44, 62, 63, 199, 200, 218.

1988

  • Wilmerding, John. American Masterpieces from the National Gallery of Art. Rev. ed. National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C., 1988: 160, repro.

1992

  • American Paintings: An Illustrated Catalogue. National Gallery of Art, Washington, 1992: 236, repro.

1998

  • Torchia, Robert Wilson, with Deborah Chotner and Ellen G. Miles. American Paintings of the Nineteenth Century, Part II. The Collections of the National Gallery of Art Systematic Catalogue. Washington, D.C., 1998: 8-10, color repro.

1999

  • Winter's Promise: Willard Metcalf in Cornish, New Hampshire 1909-1920. MacAdam, Barbara J. Hood Museum of Art, Dartmouth College, 1999: 10-11, fig. 2.

2001

  • Paris 1900: Les artistes Américains à L'exposition Universelle. Exh. cat. Musée Carnavalet, Paris. Paris, 2001: 66 fig. 72, 68.

Inscriptions

lower left: W. L. METCALF.

Wikidata ID

Q20190187

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