⮟ There is no painting diary entry for this painting, just this note below...

Comments in a notebook by RSW regarding the 1931 Myles Standish exhibit in June:

• White Clouds "Apple blossoms"

Editor's Note:

It really stinks when something is right under your nose but it takes you years to see it. That two-word note above really would have made identifying this painting from a picture we have much easier. That picture, by the way, is NOT White Clouds but rather an unsigned, unnamed canvas we believe was probably made early and inspired the 1931 canvas. We've named that canvas, May Clouds. (Apple Trees bloom in May).

You can tell how Woodward felt about a painting by where it exhibited and this one checks every box, especially when it hung at the 1944 Myles Standish Gallery. It was the last show before the hotel closed and hung a 'What's What' of the artist best, most on loan from private collection including his own.

⮜ We do not know what is going on with the exhibits at the Myles Standish Gallery in Boston the first six months of the year 1931. There were five, mostly unique, showings of Woodward's work. There were two events in February taking up most of the month. The first had thirty-two paintings and the second had eleven. In March a show was held with seventeen canvases and May had eleven. Then in June, just five paintings were shown. In the midst of all that, the artist had his Tryon Gallery show at Smith College. We believe that all of this was to take advantage of Woodward's gold medal honor at the previous year's Tercentennial Celebration in Boston. White Clouds and Winter Dignity were the only one to hang at three of those exhibits.

In total, from February to June, fifty-nine paintings, thirty-seven oils and twenty-two pastels filled 75 slots in the gallery's main showroom. All of the oils that hung at Myles, also hung at Tryon at Smith College, however, only three of the twenty-one pastels that hung at Tryon also hung at Myles suggesting Woodward had forty pastels circulating between February and May of 1931.

Boston Globe, March 10, 1931, by A. J. Philpott

"White Clouds is a picture which will appeal to those who have been fortunate enough to have seen the luminous beauty of such a sky on a clear Summer day in the hills." ⮞

The Breeze Magazine, June 5, 1931

"White Clouds is now being exhibited in one of the windows of the Myles Standish Galleries. A shoulder of the Berkshires is seen over a disordered stone wall and an old road. The mountains are framed in the full bloom of old apple trees. Above the trees and the majestic mountains, flocks of cumuli repeat the pattern of the trees against a chromatic sky. There is no fussiness or over-detail: the man who painted this canvas is glad to be alive!" To Read the Entire Article, Click Here