Featured Artwork: The Dignity of Winter

RSW's Diary Comments

None.

This scene is also listed as Winter Dignity (an oil) and on a Christmas Card as Snow Symphony. Newspaper and magazine articles often mix up the names. The Woodward records indicate that the artist intended the oil to be titled Winter Dignity and the chalk The Dignity of Winter.

North Adams Transcript, March 1, 1931

"Dignity of Winter, a picture of luminous color quality which shows austere pines and cedar set against a snowy hillside."

The Breeze, June 5, 1931

Dignity of Winter is full of power and silence. Standing in the deep snow of the foreground, we look across a tree-shadowed valley snow-patched mountain in the middle distance.

Holyoke Transcript - June 10, 1932

Robert Frost

"The poet-laureate of New England---the title is not undeserved---otherwise known as Robert Frost, bought last winter a New England landscape painted by the artist whom we readily call the laurel-crowned painter of this same region, Robert Strong Woodward. Mr. Woodward, now recognized as in the front rank of living landscape painters of America, exhibited for ten days in the Standish Galleries in Boston last February, for another ten days in Amherst a little later, and is to be again on view at Deerfield Academy during the ten days beginning June 6th. He has received many prizes at the large exhibitions of Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York and Boston. Those who know his work and who read Robert Frost declare that the combination of the New England poet and the New England painter could hardly have been more felicitously displayed than in the poet's purchase of the magnificent study, Dignity of Winter, and find that the artist in color has more than a superficial kinship with the artist in words, in the sensitive insight and understanding of our region which they both depict.

Out of this happy kinship there certainly emerges a reason for great thankfulness and rejoicing among all lovers of New England. We have loved it so long unexpressed. We have longed so to have its loveliness, its poignant atmosphere, its poetic appeal caught and made in some way permanent. We have listened again and again in vain among the poets of an older day for the note that to us was so plainly audible in the region, and have looked again and again among the artists for just the color, the line, the shadow, the inexpressible something that our eyes behold---our inward eye as well as the outward! Nowhere until now have we found just New England between the covers of a book, or on canvas there upon the wall, like a window opening out upon a well-loved landscape. In the paintings of Mr. Woodward and the poems of Mr. Frost all these things are ours to keep. 'Memory, says some other poet,' is the only garden from which nothing can ever drive us." In the same way, nothing can ever separate us from New England if we know the paintings and the poems of these two laureates who celebrate her beauty with so faithful a skill"

Signed: THE ORACLE

We transcribed this article because the original clipping is darkened and blotchy, however, to see the original clipping Click Here