Featured Artwork: Blossoms in May

May Clouds a signed but unnamed painting.
Could this be Blossoms in May?

There is no entry for this painting in the painting diary and there is only one mention of this painting in the 1932 diary.

Editor's Note:

We knew of a painting by the name "Blossoms in May" for some time but it did not come to mind when we figured out the names of the paintings from old photos of two exhibits held at the Myles Standish Gallery in Boston, MA, in 1931.

Woodward's career is exploding following the 1930 Boston Tercentennial Exhibition celebration where Woodward was the only landscape painter to earn a "Gold Medal" award. He has his first one-man show in New York City at the Grand Central Art Galleries and more than a hundred of his paintings are being juggled throughout eight galleries across three states (MA, NY, CT).

The painting we identified as White Clouds is the subject and scene of the picture we provide (upper right) you which is signed but has no name on it. Because White Clouds traveled so much to a number of large shows it would absolutely have had a name written on its stretcher. But NOW that we have been reminded of the signed but unnamed canvas we titled, May Clouds, along with this name, Blossoms in May, we think it might be the same canvas.

We checked with AI regarding the use the word "blossoms" in regard to also applying to lilacs that also bloom in May. According to Gemini, while one can refer to the bloom of a lilac flower as a blossom, the term is more commonly reserved for fruit trees, such as apple and cherry (also, cherries bloom before apples).

A picture from one of RSW's scrapbooks. For the longest time we could not pinpoint which exhibit this was because we could only identify one painting, In Old Boston. But when we manipulated the photo to reduce the glare coming from the windows behind the drapes, we began to see the "A" of the left tree and the "Y" of the tree on the right we recognized the scene as the same one as what you see above. Now we just need a name. That came from the article cited and we identified the painting on the right to be Winter Barn and the rest fell into place.