Featured Artwork: Midwinter

Tangled Branches, c. 1919
A prize-winning painting at Concord in 1922.

⮝ Most of Woodward's earliest paintings do not have painting diary entries because he did not begin to assemble it until the 1940s.

Editor's Note:

⮞ To the right is Tangled Branches. It is strikingly similar to that artwork of this page pointed out by Springfield Republican Art Critic Ernest Bagg in a private letter to the artist. It, however, is not exact. The tree on its left and the light-barked trees to the right (either birth or beech- it is hard to tell) are almost exact in placement but the small brook leading into the wooded area does not really appear as prominently in Tangled Branches. It is also, clearly, not the same time of day. Midwinter is bright and luminous, and Tangled Branches is a dusky twilight scene of the sun setting in the west, the direction the artist is facing most likely from Ashfield Road itself near his first studio, Redgate. Funny enough, this painting fits neither a true "quintessential Redgate" painting, or part of his Winter Evening Stream paintings. For more, continue below ⮟

Nameplate on the frame

From a handwritten note by RSW friend Ernest Bagg:

"'Midwinter,'... A rarely lovely mood of the leafless woods is the same scene as Tangled Branches under different conditions. Both are most effective canvases; and both have the usual Woodward characteristic of the infinity of distance delicately intimated rather than actually painted, which is art indeed..."

(SIGNED) Ernest Newton Bagg

⮞ One of RSW's early "woods" painting, you can see (to the right) the impasto technique he used at that time.

This painting exhibited in 1922 at the J. H. Miller Galleries in Springfield, Massachusetts along with Winter Mist and 4 chalk drawings. Woodward did this exhibit a year after selling six canvases wholesale to Miller the year before to raise the funds he would need to paint a lot of fifty paintings for William Macbeth, of New York City's Macbeth Galleries to chose twenty-five for a planned exhibit in January of 1923. We also learn from a letter to Springfield Museum director G.W.V. Smith that artist is strapped for cash almost six days to the day of the Redgate that would destroy all but one of the fifty paintings.

RSW's Signature from the lower left of painting

⮜ The signature from the lower left of painting looks like the signature he would make his trade-mark. This early in his career we find several versions of his signature... some with the red "S", some without... some with a year, and some without. However, when Woodward re-launches his career in 1926 and including all of the canvases he made in 1923 and '24 we know of are signed exclusively with the, now trademark, red "S". (The artist spent much of 1925 ill and there are no known paintings from that year.)

❤ The website wishes to thank its current owner for contacting us as to the whereabouts of this long lost painting. We are immensely grateful!