RSW's Diary Comments

Editor's Note:

Dr. Mark's original PowerPoint slide

It is unfortunate that we do not have a better image of this drawing. The picture above is from the early days of the website (2002 - 2005) when Dr. Mark was making the artwork pages on PowerPoint slides and his web developer, Danny, was then converting them to HTML code. While PowerPoint saves the image at its original size in its meta data, Danny had to shrink the images down to work for the still slow Internet speeds of the time.

You will find a number of these low resolution images in the first three Alphabetical Galleries because Dr. Mark's original PowerPoint slides have been loss... possibly for ever. We do not know when or how it happened but as Doc's vision worsened, these mistakes happened more frequently. We found the original files 5 years ago and folders from A to H were empty. No files in them. You can see from the close up pictures below of the name and signature that we once had much better pictures of this special artwork. It is probably the best example of this loss.

A picture of the drawing's name

A picture of Woodward's signature

This chalk drawing was made in the early 1920s of the back side of the Keach farm on Charlemont Road, Buckland, Mass. ( See Twins Barns, the left barn, for context)

This small charcoal drawing was originally purchased by Mrs. Henry (Josephine) Everett. After her death most of the Woodwards she had purchased  were  bequeathed to the Art  Institute  of

Mrs. Josephine P. Everett

Pasadena which had first choice of all of her collect-ion. This drawing and the chalk drawing The Proud Rooster were not chosen by the museum and were left to be auctioned. RSW purchased them both back. Grey Boards was then sold to a Greenfield man. The Proud Rooster was copied by RSW into an oil painting which then sold under the title Passing a Barn at Noon.

It is remarkable that Woodward bought back TWO of his pastels (he called Chalk Drawings) from an auction no less suggest how important these pieces were to the artist. Mrs. Everett is a huge and early supporter of Woodward. A famous collector and notorious patron of the arts she is relatively anonymous to the public. Her greatest legacy, outside all the art she has given to museums, is that her obituary in the Los Angeles Times credited her with wrting the check that bought the land where the Hollywood Bowl would be built. Her home in Pasadena is a Landmark and today houses The Shakespeare Club of Pasadena.

Woodward most likely met Josephine, perhaps through his father's business, real estate development, in either Ohio where the Everetts are originally from or Los Angeles when the Woodwards moved out there in 1905, young Rob arriving a year later in 1906...