"Painted from an earlier chalk drawing in the studio in 1940. Made from one of my first chalk drawings or crayons of a barn over on a back road between West Chesterfield and Worthington, beyond Connie Jarvis' farm. The drawing was bought by Mrs. Henry Everett of Pasadena, prior to 1930. At her death I had it bought for me at the auction of her possessions which were not mentioned in her will. When it came back to me I was so pleased with composition and theme that I painted from it the above canvas."
"Barn pale sunlit gray. Faded pink-red door. Sky brilliant blue with white cloud. Foreground neutral greens with stretch of blue distant hills and pink plowed field. Suggestive of a Robert Frost poem! (Incidentally, Robert Frost owns one of my paintings)."
The original chalk from which this was made: The Proud Rooster. The Proud Rooster was once owned by Woodward patron from his earliest years, Mrs. Josephine Everett. Woodward bought back the pastel from an auction of her things NOT donated to museums after her death. He never says what happen to The Proud Rooster after he gained it back.
"At the end of 2010 I was fortunate to receive from a descendant of Emmett Naylor a snap shot of a painting he owned for many years and which hung on his living room wall. He remembered that the painting sold at a Chicago auction many years ago."
To the upper right: This painting was the featured artwork for this review by the Christian Science Monitor for Woodward's April 1942, exhibition at the Vose Galleries in Boston. Vose would be Woodward's Boston agent from 1936 and for the remainder of his career.
Besides having a direct link to the chalk drawing The Proud Rooster.
There is an indirect link to another chalk/pastel painting, The Hungry Little Barn,
1927, which is what we believe is part of the same line of barns.
Note what appears to be a rooster weather vane in
the upper right hand corner behind the little barn. A comparison of all the paintings show the three structures all line up properly.
It is believed that Mrs. Josephine Everett met Woodward at a very young age. Somewhere between 8 years old and 22. We cannot tell you which because she and her husband, Henry, split their time between Cleveland, Ohio, and Pasadena, California. Mr. Everett made his fortune in interurban transportation (trolly car systems connecting new developing communities). These companies were closely tied to both the power companies of the time and real estate developers of which Woodward's father was such a developer. Woodward's father Orion, spent much of his son's early years in Ohio developing neighborhoods throughout the state from 1892 to 1905. He would then move the family to Los Angeles, California working on a number of projects links to the area's transportation and power companies.