RSW's Diary Comments

The Hay Barn, c. 1928
Another pastel from the Miller show and perhaps the
the same farm! It is hard to tell, but not impossible.

• Woodward did not keep records of the pastels he called "chalk drawings."

Editor's Note:

The J.H. Miller exhibition held at the gallery in Springfield, MA, would be another major step in Woodward's climb back from his disastrous 1922 Redgate Studio fire. It is his FIRST gallery exhibit since his 1922 Miller gallery show. The artist resumed his career in 1926 after recovering from an unspecified illness. In December of 1926 Ronald Lyman hosted an exhibit of Woodward's work in the second floor ballroom of his fine Beacon Street home. We believe this was because no gallery would book him after he left the Macbeth Gallery in New York City in the lurch because of the fire. He would do another home exhibit at Miss Anne Koch's Greenfield (MA) home in November of 1928. In 1929 he would exhibit in Utica, NY, at the Littlecote Gallery, and then Troy, NY, at an unnamed gallery, to the Myles Standish Gallery in Boston and Myles would become his art dealer in Boston up to 1936.

Vermont Barns, Chalk, c. 1928

Another interesting piece to this story is that Woodward was having issues with neuropathy in his hands in 1928 and '29 which made it difficult to handle a paintbrush the way he needed to, so he invested more time into making pastels. From 1927 to 1929, he made 4 pastels to every oil. The Miller exhibit would be the first to feature a third of all the paintings to be pastel... and it was a hit from the reviews given below. This effort would culminate in the 1929 Pynchon Gallery Exhibit that featured his pastels in the main room and if you wanted to see their companion oil canvases, they were in another room! To the left is a rare black and white photo of a chalk. The photo indicates that it exhibited. It is the only known record we have. It is found in a scrapbook. The time period is from the other items in the book. More Below ⮟

The Springfield Daily Republican,
Apr. 28, 1928

The Springfield Daily Republican, Apr. 25, 1928

⮜ ⮝ Here are two articles related to the 1928 J.H. Miller Gallery exhibition. It is a bit confusing because the Springfield Republican newspaper was going through a lot of changes in the 1920s. We have clippings were it is referred to as the 'Daily Republican' or the 'Union Republican' and there are also clippings listed as the 'Republican Tribune,' and perhaps at some time it was called the 'Herald Republican,' though we can't think of an example off the top of our head. As accurate as we try to be with these things, we do not always have the "folio" (the top part of the newspaper page with the name of the paper, the date, and day of the week) as part of the clipping in RSW's scrapbook.