Thomas Buford Meteyard personal and family papers

Meteyard was born in Rock Island, Illinois. His widowed mother, passionately interested in new cultural developments and serving as his lifelong traveling companion, moved with her son to her hometown of Scituate, Massachusetts, in 1881. Meteyard attended Phillips Academy at Andover and, briefly, Harvard University. On his second journey abroad, in 1888, Meteyard encountered in London the work of its English leaders, notably designer Walter Crane and painter and illustrator Edward Burne-Jones. In Paris, he enrolled at the Ecole des Beaux-Arts and studied with painter Léon Bonnat. He immersed himself in the Parisian avant-garde, eventually exhibiting with a group of French artists and illustrators called the Nabis. Meteyard also admired the work of French impressionist painter Claude Monet: between 1890 and 1893, along with other American artists, Meteyard made regular visits to Giverny, the rural village in Normandy, France, where Monet was living.

In Giverny, Meteyard contributed illustrations to the casual publication Le Courrier Innocent, issued by the resident American artists. 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.