Recent Website Updates

OUR CURRENT PROJECT MISSION:
We are looking to add greater depth of insight that fleshes out more context than we have ever had about Woodward's career as well as his personal values and principles. The stories just begin to tell themselves. And something like that results from processing the information one has available, turning it into empirical (measurable) data. Once it has been compiled, it then needs to be interpreted and analyzed and you start to see patterns and connections that are not always obvious despite being right under your nose for years.


More daunting will be the Scrapbook portion of the website. As of right now, the information under the Redgate Studio, the Hiram Woodward Place, and the Heath Pasture House are all woefully out-of-date. It is a top priority for us to update these pages, especially the Hiram Place, for which there is so much never-before-known information to add.


In addition to the studio pages, we have been assembling as many as 15 new Scrapbook pages and just as many in the queue for a much needed update. We suggest you go to our new Miss Mabel page to see what we mean. There are also important people in Woodward's life we have neglected to give their due. We are now distinguishing some of these individuals as "patrons", "benefactors", and sponsors. One page in particular will reveal just how critical one woman was to Woodward having any career at all.

UPDATE: March 02, 2026

It has not been a pleasant start to the audit of the ST Gallery... I started it in mid-December, 2025, and I am still only two rows into it. I also want to point out that two of the pages in those first couple of rows are new pictures and were updated just before Dec. '25. So of the eleven pages after The Saddleback Barn; Vermont, two were updated before Saddleback, and two groups of two had the same names. That is just over half the pages. It should have gone more smoothly than it did. Still, it proved to be worth it.

The greatest obstacle has been vetting the information on the pages. Originally, Dr. Mark gave the name, September Pastoral, to two pastels of the same subject, one the copy of the other. The information comes from a letter RSW wrote to his friend F. Earl Williams. He tells Williams he made a copy of a pastel which is going to its buyer the next day and its copy will go to friends of his when they visit next month. But there is another letter with more detail... and it is from there we begin to put the pieces together that leads to finding a name, and what the subject is. The most difficult part was writing a story that made sense of it all.

After that detour, I was ready to move forward quickly when looking at the pictures we had of September Peace (1918), I recognized the hill in the distance and let myself get caught up in determining if it was possible that the hill in the distance could be seen from where RSW says he painted the canvas... and I did. We realize people LOVE to know where RSW painted some of his paintings, so while it took me away from progress, the result was worth it.

In the midst of all of this, Larch had an idea of a way to make our work of formatting pages easier, and we tested a number of models over the month, and we are close to having a reliable process moving forward.

BCM

♦ We have always used the 1918 picture to illu-strate both canvases. We are not going to do this any more. The truth of the matter is, the 1933 paint-ing is larger, and surely painted in a more evolved style than the 1918 paint-ing. Still, we have a new picture of the 1918 paint-ing and it just so happen-ed to coincided with our audit of both these pages. We added a lot of new material and explanation, including where we be-lieve RSW sat to paint the farm and familiar hill in the distance.

♦ Updated for the audit with, explanations, new pictures and an illustration.

♦ Similar to the September Peace paintings this pastel and its sibling have been sorted out with new information and explanations that lead to an interesting discovery. Dr. Mark traditionally gave paintings names when he knew its subject but not its name. The same subject would just be given a number, thus #1 and #2... continued below

♦ ...but with the inform-ation available we were able to suss out the name of #2 as well as find evi-dence supporting our findings.

As if we do not already have enough theme galleries, we add another. The idea was given to us when working on the "Vermont Five" paintings. When you add the historic church paintings with paintings of Mount Equinox, and RSW's beloved "Halifax House," as well as the Southern Vermont Art Association providing him two of his best customers... It is deserving of its own place on the website and these are just the paintings we have pictures. There is another couple dozen or so we know the name but do not have pictures so they can't be in a theme gallery.

An oversight on our part, we have new pictures of this painting we have officially named. As many of you know, we want to reduce the number of paintings in the "unnamed" section. RSW often allowed his custom-ers to name paintings themselves if he had not already given it a name. We encourage everyone with an unnamed painting to name it. But for us NOT to have taken new pictures of this restored 1918 paintings after it was returned is egregious. Enjoy.

It is not necessarily "a new picture" of this painting but more of an example of how much we are learning from the new image editing techniques we are applying. As we come across images that we think we can do better with the information we have now... we do it and share it with you.

Last month's difficulty regarding the 5 paintings of the Norton Farm has been worked out. You can visit any one of the five art work pages and get the gist of what we believe happened after RSW's 1928 visit to Mrs. Dresser, but visit each page for details specific to the painting of that page. In order of appearance...

Note that the first oil canvas made is the last to exhibit... read to learn why.

This pastel was suspected to have been made on the same 1928 visit to Mrs. Dresser in Riverton, VT. That was proven to be not only incorrect but impossible. This pastel could only have been made in 1927 and when one looks closely enough, it becomes clear RSW is to the west, not east, of Camel's Hump mountain.

We believe this is from the same farm as The Hay Barn above. It however, did not exhibit until the J.H. Miller show along with The Saddle-back Barn. Visit any of these pastel art work pages to learn why RSW made more pastels than oils in that time period.

We continue to work diligently to get better pictures of Woodward's paintings and given the recent interest in geraniums we scoured our files to see if there was maybe a better image or a pic we can work with using our new skills in editing. We succeeded... for both items listed here.

This beautiful painting picture had a waxy sheen in some of the darker areas which can be distracting to view. We now know how to remove it and the difference is amazing.

We have two Scrapbook pages related to Arnold Purinton, Dr. Mark's youngest brother, who recently passed. One is a recollection of his from childhood and involves Woodward. The other is under our "tributes" section of the Scrapbook Gallery. It is a picture gallery featuring Arnold's skill and craftsmanship building miniatures of historic Buckland homes, including the Southwick home and studio. In honor of Arnold, we updated the pages and the pictures.

This very personal and unusual Window Picture Painting came to us from its owner. It is a painting RSW arranged a bit hap-hazardly with great intent-ion. A snow covered land-scape outside the north window with a newspaper, beech tree branch with oriole nest still attached, a tin bowl of hickory nuts with some tossed about the window shelf... and in the display corner sits last month's featured new pic-ture, Portrait of a Shadow.

This is the painting seen in the sepia print image we have. We had to make a new page for it because it does not match the painting above. This canvas has More Snow Tomorrow in the display corner.

It has been a long wait for us but we finally have a picture of this wonderful painting once owned by Mrs. Julia Dresser. However, as she aged and knew her time was nearing, she gave this painting and another she owned back to RSW who, after her death in 1937, sold it to another dear friend in Newport, Rhode Island.

Another "Late Summer" painting, this was made from the Dresser property, looking north toward Stowe, VT and Mt. Manfield.

Dozens of pictures taken over several years is what it took to finally get a suitable picture of this very personal 1919 paint-ing by RSW. These early paintings are so hard to photograph. Even when you think you have good pics, they do not hold up when you look at them on a computer screen.

We added a lot of new information regarding the meaning and metaphor of this uniquely named canvas... oh, and we also added it to the growing "Late Summer" gallery which is approaching 100 paintings.

In our artwork page audit we came across The Patient Angel (below ⮟) and remembered we had new pictures of a Gabriel Weathervane for this artwork page. It turns out we also did a new scan of the only picture we have of this painting. During that process we realize that its appearance in the newspaper held more meaning than meets the eye. It's a good read...

Two years later the painting above AND this canvas exhibit together furthering our theory...

An unusual scene for Woodward described in a newspaper review in 1922 draws our attention in this artwork page audit.

Another painting in our audit but is also connect-ed to the 1928 J.H. Miller Gallery exhibit and more Vermont themed work fitting with the other updates for this month.

This only member of the "Q" gallery stands alone in subject as well. The Heath scene appears seven theme gallery pages, a record!

Woodward's most loved painting has new pictures and we could not be more grateful. We have always had a picture, but it was mislabeled as covered in our updates in Sept. '25. We also had early Koda-chrome pictures of the painting but given it was the early days of color film, the picture did not show a true represent-ation of the canvas but now we do...

This is also an opportunity to explore RSW's love of November. We use this painting to dive deeper into the topic that we suspect embodies that love.

A standout at this past Spring's exhibition in Deerfield, we took new pictures of this canvas doing our best to capture its stoic palette that simply left people staring at it for long periods of time. While it appears to be almost entirely in scales of grey, a closer look reveals the subtly in which Woodward used rich purples and greens for its depth.

Because we updated Out the Bedroom Window, we also added new pictures to this page, as well as In the Winter Hills.

Again, as part of our audit of every artwork page, this page has been up-dated and reorganized. All the images used on the page have been re-edited or re-worked. There is a bonus section on this page where we provide links to all the parties related to the subject. We recommend you do the virtual tour of the book.

This page has been updated but not only that, we have added new pictures giving the scene added context. This is a painting Woodward made from his bedroom window, which one, we are not sure. Still with the evidence we provide, we narrow down the mystery.

Our update of this page includes color pictures of the Heath Pasture Studio, and helped us realize that when the studio was finished RSW made a third of all Beech tree paintings in a matter of months afterward. We also explore more of the artist love of November...

This page has been updated as part of our audit. It has been reorg-anized but we also made a considerable effort to find exactly where this barn was located from RSW's diary comments. We got close but did not find a place matching the painting.

We recently discovered an article for the 1928 home exhibit hosted by Miss Anna Koch listing six previously unknown pastels. We have now added them to the website:

While we do not have pictures of these pastels, we do offer comparable paintings and additional information.

This painting made in 1942 was sold in New York, but ended up in Boston. It went missing briefly, and found again a couple months before RSW's death. It was one of the artist most praised canvases when hung at one of his most popular exhibits. For as much as we do know, there is much more we do not.

A painting of the same subject as Invitation (above), was painted for his friend Clifford Rich-mond to present to the Easthampton (MA) Public Library where it still hangs today. We've added new color pictures taken of the scene in its day.

When have said it many times before that we will always try to get a better picture of a painting when the opportunity presents itself. Despite having updating the pic of this painting 10 months ago. It hung at the Colrain Hist-orical Society's annual art exhibit and we had excel-lent light and took more! Also, the event was out-standing. Be sure to catch it next year.

The pictures we were using of this painting were long over due for a re-fresh. It is a large painting and old and difficult to take down from the wall... But it was worth it to see the difference between 20 year old pics and today.Check it out!

Every painting has a story. Besides its subject, it has its journey. Like the canvas, Invitation, it hung at the well reviewed 1942 New York City exhibition, which happens to have become a story in its own right.

It was complete coinci-dence that Orchard Window was just two pages away from Invi-tation in our artwork page audit. Yet, Orchard Window would not let itself be overshadowed. The Grand Central Art Gallery selected it for its annual Founders' Day fundraiser where it was sold. Sixty-five years later, it reappears in 2010, when it exhibits at the von Liebig Gallery in Naples, FL. Check it out!

Using newspaper descriptions of this painting from the Boston papers we have a theory as to the subject of this painting we have no picture of and we offer you those options. A pastel, it reportedly hung at the 1930 Tercentennial Exhibition along with New England Drama. Some-thing we were completely unaware prior. We have added it to our exhibit records. It also exhibited the first six months of the crazy year 1931, the theme of last months updates. (below )

This page has been updated as part of our audit. It is worth a visit if you want to see something out of ordinary for Woodward.

Here is another example of using what we know to link a painting title to a similar subject. This painting went to RSW's patron-saint, Mrs. Ada Moore's sister in California. We have added pictures and some background information.

New information on the year this painting was made makes it one of the earliest Window Picture Paintings made in the Southwick studio. Woodward did not start painting these types of paintings with regularity until after 1937. It is once again, one of the main reasons we are doing this audit of the artwork pages.

As part of our invest-igation into The Little Farmhouse and Portrait of a Shadow conflict we were able to identify, from newspaper descriptions, this previously unnamed painting in our collection as September Evening.

This discovery and many others came as result of this endeavor into the confounding four exhibit-ions held at the Standish Gallery from February to June in 1931. We have broke down all of the paintings in circulation at this time and what hung where and what over-lapped. This detour took us more than a whole week to sort out and makes up much of our August updates.

See graph below ⮟

The line graph above needs some explanation. The numbers are how many exhibit spots his paintings filled throughout the year, and NOT the total number of paintings. For example, as we explain above, Woodward had 89 total paintings circulating in the first six months of 1931 and those paintings filled 137 opens spots on walls in the numerous shows he was committed to and for the whole year he topped more than 250 spots in all.

You can see that Woodward was preparing for 1931 long before it arrived. He filled less than 25 spots at exhibits the year before, and below his average in 1929 filling 66 spots. It was Woodward's success in 1930, Boston's year-long Tercentennial (300th) birthday celebration where he took two top honors at two separate events, including one of only four gold medals awarded at the Tercentennial exhibit held in Horti-cultural Hall. That success translated into his first shows in New York City, New Haven, CT, Northampton, MA, and Syracuse, NY. 1931 is far-and-away the biggest year of his career when it come to exhibiting.

We have previously talked about our new method of photographing paintings, especially hard to capture paintings like the pastels. Here is a new picture of this outstanding painting.

Our new method of taking pictures of paintings helps cut down glare and gives a truer depiction of the colors Woodward used. Check out the reds, blues, and purples of this beauty!

Our other major discov-ery in our investigation of the 1931 Myles Standish exhibit produced the identification of this paint-ing. It started with a recognizable pattern in a terrible picture and led to confirmation via news-paper descriptions. MORE ⮟

This is the new name of a previously unnamed painting. We are always happy to have a name for a painting. This canvas was critical in helping us determine the above painting's subject.

From the earliest days of the website, it was believed that the name above was the original name of Portrait of a Shadow. The confusion originated when a picture of, Portrait of a Shadow, was incorrectly caption in the Boston Globe. How-ever, RSW himself made matters worse with a story he told two critics... MORE ⮟

This is RSW's "most loved" canvas. It was important to him in many ways. We tell its whole story...

The following are highlights of our recently audited pages:

Confusion over this painting, its name and its year has been cleared up with the discovery of a clipping.

We add ANOTHER painting to the seven others made of the Keach's Little Red Barn interior!

we recently learned this highly honored painting has another feather. It was in the top ten most popular canvases of the 1930 "Boston Art Week" celebration exhibit.

As we refine of photo taking techniques and skills, we cannot resist the opportunity to get new pictures when given the opportunity. Window picture paintings are especially hard because of the dark areas around the windows tend to reflect light when there is too much. It is a delicate balance to make sure we get as accurate an image as possible.

This award winning canvas is certainly deserving of our best and we captured it beautifully. Enjoy!

A one of a kind pastel for Woodward, we have never captured it in a way that was satisfactory until now. The new image is as true to what you see when standing in front of it as we have ever gotten... the reds, greens, and yellows all holding there our place without dis-coloring each other.

Woodward's chalk drawings are the hardest of all to take pictures of because they are under glass and the glass panes are often in varying conditions making each a unique challenge.

Neither this painting or the one below are new pictures as it were. They both are old pictures newly rediscovered originals that we were able to apply our new editing techniques to get the best out of them. The image for this canvas is a huge improvement on the previous.

Again, this is an old-new picture we found misplaced in the wrong folder. The original image being more than 20 years old was small and not great in the first placed was made better by us than what we had. We also found a very similar picture of the mountain in the artwork to match up the two.

Brian has been working on updating this original 2011 Painting Story essay on Woodward's Winter Evening Stream (WES) paintings by Dr. Mark for months. Need-less to say, it got quite out of hand. We have so much more information about these paintings than was available when Doc originally wrote it. There is now far more Brian than Doc, but it couldn't be helped... Doc was on to something really profound. He simply did not have all the information necessary to put it all together. In this essay you will learn how these 14 known canvas-es are critical mediations at transitional times in the artist life.

Our audit of the website's artwork pages continues. We are up to An October Pasture in the OPQR Gallery. Below, we select-ed a few outstanding pages worth another look...

A totally new page reflecting our realization there are 3 paintings by the single name "October."

A rear view of Wood-ward's much loved maple in Mrs. Griswold's pasture for the pasture itself.

A lot of confusion surrounding this painting's name has been sorted out and confirmed to be the 1923 canvas.

Not only did we get a new image, though still from a newspaper, it lead to dis-covering that this painting was also honored for a "prize in painting" at the 1929, Stockbridge Art Association's annual event. Digging deeper we realize this canvas needs to be placed among RSW's most editorial pieces. It hung at every major exhibit he had after 1930 and was bought by a serious collector, and Amherst alum.

Since we were straight-ening out New England Winter, we also updated its buyer, Mr. Pratt's profile page, adding new information and pictures.

This painting, recently exhibited at the Memorial Hall Museum in Deerfield (MA) has never had a good image. For years these early dusk-time, dark wooded interiors, have perplexed us. RSW used a varnish to pre-serve them and it darken-ed over time placing a seemingly impenetrable barrier over them.

Using a powerful light with a polarized filter, along with a camera fitted with a polarized lens, we managed to reduce the glare and capture the true beauty of this emotionally convincing scene.

This page has been updated, including updating the picture we already had using new editing methods for color correction and balancing. Along with these updates, we also updated the 2007 scrapbook story researc-hed and written by Janet Gerry. More on this below ⮟

As hard as it may be to believe, this painting caused its share of trouble for RSW in the most amusing way... he couldn't wait to get rid of it! New layout and pic-tures added caption by Brian.

All three of the artwork pages above have been updated, not only with new information or updated old info...
⮟ My Winter Shelf, forever confused with its sibling The Window: A Still Life and Winter Scene, is designed for it to stand on its own...
⮟ My Grandmother's Lamp, was missing an incredible distinction. It was sent to New York City for the 1932, National Academy of Design's annual show.
⮞ Near the Sky holds a couple of mysteries we do our best to sort out. Visit the page to learn more.

The Accolades & Awards gallery needed to be up-dated after the discovery that New England Winter received an honor from Stockbridge in 1929. That now makes 20 canvases to get recognition at prestigious shows and events. Three of those painting were honored twice!

We missed a couple of paintings where apples, particularly where the tree themselves appear. These additions to this gallery has pushed it up one slot, past Stunning Skies, for fifth place in the most frequent items list.

To go along with this month's "Featured Artwork" above, "The Road to Church," this new image of the same subject in the wonderful colors of fall just came to us from its owner. we also learned more about another painting just outside the view of this canvas and so we also updated...

... which shows a sugar house to the right of the scene that Woodward painted facing the opposite direction, thus giving us a look at where he positioned himself to make three canvases of the village center.

It is still not a great picture because it is captured from an old newspaper clipping but it is better than nothing. Also, we have updated the information on the page to include other paintings it is related to and their differences.

One of the more surpris-ing facts discovered was that it was made much earlier than previously known. This earlier date makes the canvas Wood-ward's first, true, Still Life painting. It does have a window in it but the window is not the main feature of the canvas. RSW only made eleven still lifes in his career and he only made them bet-ween 1926 and 1931.

We updated this recol-lection written by Dr. Mark more than a decade ago.It is a first had ac-count of his experience and knowledge of how this painting got its name. A name Woodward did not really like very much but because he allowed owners to name their paintings if they did not already have name, he honored it. It even has its own painting diary entry.

Brian then adds his own commentary on the name, giving his theory as to why Woodward did not necessarily like it. Yet still, ultimately he finds a remote connection that gives the name some meaningful relevance to how Woodward felt about his Heath Pasture.

This is a wonderful story about the work that went into finding out the loca-tion of this house Wood-ward painted at least three times in and around 1930. It was not easy because, in truth, the house was not owned by Mr. Franklin... he rented it. Woodward obviously did not know that or if he did, because Mr. Franklin was living in it - it was his home.

The page has been refor-matted and all of the pictures have been up-dated. We have even added some new ones!

Many thanks to Randy Frazier with the help of Norma Thibodeau to get to the bottom of this mystery many years ago.

In one of our more em-barrassing gaffs, this page has been updated with the correct and substantiated information.

Years ago we received an email from someone be-lieving to know the missing gap in proven-ance for this painting. While this person did not lie to us or intend to mis-lead us, nor was the information wrong. The information was merely an incredible coincidence of one thing having no connection to the other.

We now have the correct information as to how the Dwyer sisters came to jointly own the painting, Contentment, and it is un-impeachable

A project three months in the making and a month too later. The shear amount of new inform-ation alone surprised even us. In 2011, Dr. Mark published an essay on the subject of Wood-ward's Winter Evening Stream paintings (WES for short). Fourteen years later we had new images of many of the paintings, as well as a better grasp on the years they were made.

The new page is long. It is structure in three sec-tions starting with Doc's original copy, followed by its addendum written by Brian. The last part is Brian's commentary with supporting data that breaks down what makes the WES paintings so unique.

This page has been updated and pictures have been re-edited using new methods that offers a much better look at this award winning paintings.

This page has been updated as part of our artwork page audit. The bonus is that examining the picture of this painting we noticed how perfecting it appeared to fit the Golden Spiral. We laid our golden spiral over the image and it lined up in such a way it is worth sharing.

This artwork page has been added to the list of complete works. It was one of the painting names we discovered in our audit of the So. Vermont Artist Assoc. brochures. Only, this painting was also very well reviewed by critic Royal Cortizzos making it stand out from the others.

This artwork page was updated as well and is believed to be related to the pastel above. Our image is terrible but it at least shows what the pastel above resembles.

Most of our efforts this month was on the WES essay honoring Dr. Mark. However, we still managed to update the following artwork pages.

Not that we haven't given you more than enough to keep you busy for at least the rest of winter... we do encourage you to visit, if you haven't already, some of Doc's Scrapbook essay we have updated and added new information...

We have updated this page with "new" pictures. New is in quotes because the pictures are not recent. In fact, they are nearly a decade old. They got lost in the mix somehow, and put aside only to get lost track of.

Better late than never, and the pics where taken with the same camera we still use today. The timing of it is also exciting because not only do we have great pictures of this beautiful painting, but it comes just after locating a contemporary friend from the same year, In the Sugar Bush.

Speaking of over looking something... neither Larch or Brian noticed for more than 15 years that this painting had been cut down by Woodward, and significantly so, by more than 40%. We illustrate to difference and how we made the discovery, along with some other new information.

This fell right in our lap as part of our artwork page audit. This painting, which we have no image of may be either (1) its own separate painting related to another known painting by its similar name... OR, (2) it does NOT exist at all. It might be a mistake similar to what we discuss with Old New England (Oil). A reporter or type-setter at the newspaper may have heard the name wrong... Nothing definitive so again we encourage you to read the story.

We have two known crayon drawing made by Woodward and when we say crayon, we mean crayon, not pastel or chalk. We do not know what prompted him to make the drawings but they are exceptionally well done. The crayons are not signed which makes sense. They were not done for professional reasons, yet, perhaps it was simply a matter of experimentation. We do not know.

As it is with the summary above, this page was updated as part of our audit of each and every artwork page. Some updates yield, new information, or disproves information previously posted.

Updated as part of our audit of each and every artwork page.

This is one of the best examples of correcting a long made error and this painting has finally found its true name. The error was made from a news-paper clipping where this canvas was the featured artwork. However, it was captioned "Landscape" and without more inform-ation, Dr. Mark felt com-pelled to stick with that until we learn otherwise, which we have... Read the story!

This new pastel came to us recently by way of a gallery that was selling it. You've seen the pictures because we announced the sale last month. It has since been sold and no longer available. How-ever, this artwork holds a particularly special place at a special time and its story says a lot about how RSW felt about it.

Below are 4 more of 19 newly discovered painting names found in an audit of Woodward's personal collection of Southern Vermont Artists Associ-ation exhibit programs not originally included in the Deerfield Academy's 1970 catalog of Wood-ward's work.

3- Oils

1- Pastel

AND here is another over-looked , but well regarded, painting from the 1928 Los Angeles County Museum exhibit:

1- Oils

The search is over! This painting that exhibited at Woodward's homecoming when he sent seven paintings to the 7th An-nual exhibition at Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria, IL, a month after winning the Hallgarten First prize at the National Academy of Design's annual show. The artist attended the school from 1901 to 1904 receiving his high school diploma from there in 1902.

In 1977, Dr. Mark receiv-ed a letter from an art dealer giving him first shot at purchasing the painting, to which Doc had passed. Forty- seven years later it reappears and we have the pictures.

Of the seven paintings to hang at Bradley, we only know the names of four and now have pictures of three. The last holdout is the oil painting, Snow Pattern.