RSW's Diary Comments

"Prior to1930. A large painting with dark opening into the woods through birch trees, made up Hog Hollow Road at back of Uncle Bert's orchard below "old barn."

Clarification on the image above:

The image used on this page is not an oil painting. It is clearly a chalk drawing. Note the squggley lines used to fill in the background. Such lines would not be found in an oil painting. With that being said this image matches the description given in RSW's diary comments. Moreover, there appears to be two names associated with this image, this painting, and At the Edge of the Pines.

At the Edge of the Pines is not listed in the exhibition list. It may be that the chalk drawing is At the Edge of the Pines, the name on the back of the photograph. It is rare, but there are a couple of black and white photos of chalk drawings, Vermont Barns is an example. But Vermont Barns exhibited 3 times in 2 years, thus the image.

Boston Globe, December 23, 1926
by A.J. Philpott

Boston Post, Thursday, Dec. 9, 1926, by A.J. Philpott

"An extremely effective painting is called At the Edge of the Woods ... a clump of graceful white birch with vivid yellow leaves stand at each side of an opening that leads seemingly into an impenetrable forest."

Springfield Union, Springfield, Mass., April 23, 1928 by Jeannette C. Matthews

"... such a picture as At the Edge of the Woods is usually spoken of as a decorative landscape, but to me it is like the illustration for a fairy book. It is the imaginative quality, even more than the light, color, rhythm or pictorial quality in such a work that 'gets you' ..." See full article below

Springfield Republican, April 4, 1928

Springfield Sunday Union, March 13, 1927

Editor Note on the clipping above:

We had no reference as to the year or source of this small clipping Dr. Mark added to this page. After a bit of homework, we learned the clipping came from the Springfield Sunday Union, regarding the 8th annual Springfield Art League exhibition, and since Woodward did not write a date on the article in his scrapbook, we used the dates of known previous and latter events to determine the article could have only been published on March 13th, 1927. A good thing because the artist only used a red pen to mark up his newspaper mentions from 1922 to 1929! As a courtesy we cleaned up the clip in the enlarged version for easy reading... oh, and "liteool" is a typo we believe was meant to be 'literal.'