Featured Artwork: Evening Woodland

RSW's Diary Comments

Editor's Note:

This painting does not have its own a diary entry. Instead, Woodward wrote one for the painting just like it he made AFTER this painting. Read the diary comments for Woodland Mystery below:

"Painted 1951 Feb. or Mar. Next to last painting made before illness. Sold Aug. 1952 to Mr. and Mrs. Winfred Rhoades of Sudbury, Mass."

A Snip of the 1951 SVAA Exhibit Program
Enlarge the image above to see more!

You ask how we know this? Because this painting above hung at the Southern Vermont Artist Association (SVAA) in the first week of September thru Labor Day in 1951. The diary comments state that Woodland Mystery was sold a year after. Still, there is a discrepancy and it is a glaring one - Woodward makes NO mention of any other paintings!

This is not a good time for the artist. He clearly mentions "before the illness." We have his 1951 personal diary. We will not reveal much other than to say that he stopped making regular entries in the first week of June. After that there are only 4 entries the rest of the year. We suspect that this was a serious issue requiring regular treatments.

Complicating matters more is he wrote the wrong year (1950) on the 1951 program seen to the left. We checked and verified that the only "Sunday Sept. 2nd" occurred in 1951, a very late year for Labor Day, the 10th. As for the time he painted this painting? We suspect he made this painting, in February of 1951. It exhibited it at the SVAA in 1951. We continue this discussion below...

A Tranquil Hour, c. 1922
All early versions of this scene we know of are
upright portrait paintings. See below for more.

Making sense of this is no easy task. The past couple of years we have been finding more and more discrepancies in the diary because we can now cross reference multiple sources that have been digitalized and easily searchable. The mistake the artist makes most often is the year.

We have also been able to determine things like-- when he started preparing for certain exhibitions. Painting a winter scene, like this piece, would be for the Spring events. The fact it exhibited at the SVAA is very unusual. The SVAA paintings are mostly spring and later summer scenes. Woodward would hold a winter scene that did not sell in the spring for the big November shows leading into the holidays.

Here is what we do know:

We are certain there is missing information regarding where this painting exhibited in the spring.

The two images that we have for each painting are different photographs! This is important to establishing two separate paintings. Also, the one associated with this artwork is the better of the two indicating it was intended for exhibitions.

We are certain this painting was the painting made in Feb./Mar. of 1951. Woodland Mystery was made later, and remembered better because it was made for the Rhoades, who were good friends, and that it was the SECOND TO LAST canvas Woodward made before retiring in 1952.

---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Evening Mists, 1945
To see how it matches this canvas enlarge.

Between 1937 and 1945 Woodward re-painted a series of 14 to 20 year old Redgate paintings he had stored because he was never really satisfied with them. We imagine this is one of those paintings. The originals were destroyed so we do not know if there was a landscape version of this same scene made in the 1920s because it was destroyed, and he makes no reference to having "re-painted it" from an earlier version.

What we mean when we say, "this same scene" is more specific than you might think. There are a few versions of this subject, however, we differentiate them by the position and placement of the snow covered stones in the wintery pool as well as the pool themselves vary.

While we cannot confirm Woodward painted this from an earlier 1920 painting, we do not really need to because we have a "re-painted" canvas matching this painting but in a portrait format. To the right we have Evening Mists, made in 1945 from an earlier 1920s painting. We took Evening Mists and cropped it to fit over the sepia above...

What you are looking at here is the sepia print, Evening Woodland at 50% opaqucy over the, cropped color image of Evening Mist. All we did was line up the stone circled and the rest took care of itself. They are not exact but close enough. Also, Evening Woodland was made to be much wider and as such a bit stretched out to compensate.