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Thomas Buford Meteyard
1865–1928
BirthplaceRock Island, Illinois, United States of America
Death placeGlion, Vaud, Switzerland
BiographyIn the course of his peripatetic and wide-ranging career, painter and graphic artist Thomas Buford Meteyard worked at the crossroads of some of the most important art movements of his day in Europe and the United States. Meteyard was born in Rock Island, Illinois. His widowed mother, who was passionately interested in new cultural developments and who would serve as his lifelong traveling companion, moved with her son to her hometown of Scituate, Massachusetts, near Boston, in 1881. Meteyard attended Phillips Academy at Andover and, briefly, Harvard University.
In Boston, Meteyard was introduced to the new aesthetic movement and its ideal of “art for art’s sake” or the elevation of pure decoration over moral or narrative content. On his second journey abroad in 1888, Meteyard encountered in London the work of the movement's English leaders, notably designer Walter Crane (1845–1915) and painter and illustrator Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898). In Paris, he sought traditional academic training, enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studying with painter Léon Bonnat (1833–1922); meanwhile, he immersed himself in the Parisian avant-garde, eventually exhibiting with a group of French artists and illustrators called the Nabis, who used flat forms, patterning, and linear contour for symbolic, sometimes mystical effect. Meteyard also admired the work of French impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840–1926): between 1890 and 1893, along with other American artists, Meteyard made regular visits to Giverny, the rural village in Normandy, France, where Monet lived. Meteyard’s oil and watercolor paintings of landscapes in and around Giverny won him favorable attention from critics when they were exhibited in Paris and in the United States, especially in Chicago, in the early 1890s.
In Giverny, Meteyard contributed illustrations to the casual publication The Courrier Innocent, issued by the resident artists. The short-lived journal integrated poems and illustrations, echoing a common goal of the English aesthetic movement and the French Nabis to dissolve barriers between painting and graphic design, illustration, and other applied arts. Meteyard began to work seriously as a graphic artist on his return to the United States in 1893. He received commissions for book covers, illustrations, and posters. Resettled in Scituate, he joined a close-knit group of Boston-area aesthetes known as the Visionists, which included architects, poets, painters, and designers. Meteyard also continued his work as a landscapist, experimenting particularly with watercolor. He exhibited widely and with some success, but in 1906 he left Scituate to take up permanent residence in England and continued working as a landscape painter until his death.
In Boston, Meteyard was introduced to the new aesthetic movement and its ideal of “art for art’s sake” or the elevation of pure decoration over moral or narrative content. On his second journey abroad in 1888, Meteyard encountered in London the work of the movement's English leaders, notably designer Walter Crane (1845–1915) and painter and illustrator Edward Burne-Jones (1833–1898). In Paris, he sought traditional academic training, enrolling at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studying with painter Léon Bonnat (1833–1922); meanwhile, he immersed himself in the Parisian avant-garde, eventually exhibiting with a group of French artists and illustrators called the Nabis, who used flat forms, patterning, and linear contour for symbolic, sometimes mystical effect. Meteyard also admired the work of French impressionist painter Claude Monet (1840–1926): between 1890 and 1893, along with other American artists, Meteyard made regular visits to Giverny, the rural village in Normandy, France, where Monet lived. Meteyard’s oil and watercolor paintings of landscapes in and around Giverny won him favorable attention from critics when they were exhibited in Paris and in the United States, especially in Chicago, in the early 1890s.
In Giverny, Meteyard contributed illustrations to the casual publication The Courrier Innocent, issued by the resident artists. The short-lived journal integrated poems and illustrations, echoing a common goal of the English aesthetic movement and the French Nabis to dissolve barriers between painting and graphic design, illustration, and other applied arts. Meteyard began to work seriously as a graphic artist on his return to the United States in 1893. He received commissions for book covers, illustrations, and posters. Resettled in Scituate, he joined a close-knit group of Boston-area aesthetes known as the Visionists, which included architects, poets, painters, and designers. Meteyard also continued his work as a landscapist, experimenting particularly with watercolor. He exhibited widely and with some success, but in 1906 he left Scituate to take up permanent residence in England and continued working as a landscape painter until his death.