The show "Courage and Peace," will feature 21 original works by our acclaimed Western Mass landscape artist. It will include several recently discovered and never-before-exhibited canvases and drawings, along with a number of the artist's larger paintings. Do not miss this rare opportunity. This event is brought to you collectively by the Friends of Robert Strong Woodward organization, the Pocumtuck Valley Memorial Association with the aid and cooperation of the Woodward estate and this website.

FOR ADDITIONAL INFORMATION, HOURS, and MORE...
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Recent Website Updates

OUR CURRENT PROJECT MISSION:
We are looking to add greater depth of insight that fleshes out more context than we have ever had about Woodward's career as well as his personal values and principles. The stories just begin to tell themselves. And something like that results from processing the information one has available, turning it into empirical (measurable) data. Once it has been compiled, it then needs to be interpreted and analyzed and you start to see patterns and connections that are not always obvious despite being right under your nose for years.



More daunting will be the Scrapbook portion of the website. As of right now, the information under the Redgate Studio, the Hiram Woodward Place, and the Heath Pasture House are all woefully out-of-date. It is a top priority for us to update these pages, especially the Hiram Place, for which there is so much never-before-known information to add.


In addition to the studio pages, we have been assembling as many as 15 new Scrapbook pages and just as many in the queue for a much needed update. We suggest you go to our new Miss Mabel page to see what we mean. There are also important people in Woodward's life we have neglected to give their due. We now distinguishing some of these individuals as "patrons", "benefactors", and sponsors. One page in particular will reveal just how critical one women was to Woodward having any career at all.

UPDATE: April 01, 2025
I was really hoping that I would have a Scrapbook page that I have been working on updating ready to publish this month. It is Dr. Mark's 2011 essay on Woodward's "Winter Evening Stream" paintings, a term he coined. I was led to it after all of the work I did, and already shared with you in the updates for February (Winter Silence, Winter Pool, and the Evening Stream paint-ings). It is one of Doc's best and most insightful scrap-book pages. It is now five years since he passed and he is greatly missed. There is not a month that goes by where I find a question I regret not asking him. I wanted to honor him by taking his essay in its original form and adding addendums to each section filled with all the new information we have today, fourteen years later.

The problem is that during my process of adding all of the new information and correcting misunderstood items, I saw a very strange pattern. While Doc was correct that these paintings were among his favorites, they only appear at certain times, mostly transitional periods of RSW's career when the future is uncertain. Doc never identified what made these paintings so important, however, he did get very close.

As it is with Woodward these painting serve a very literal and figurative message... they embody calm tranquillity but under are meditative processing of stress and uncertainty during times when an ambiguous future is approaching and the latent and kinetic potentials that result. Again, another fascinating study by the artist. One of his more cerebral endeavors.

A project three months in the making and a month too later. The shear amount of new inform-ation alone surprised even us. In 2011, Dr. Mark published an essay on the subject of Wood-ward's Winter Evening Stream paintings (WES for short). Fourteen years later we had new images of many of the paintings, as well as a better grasp on the years they were made.

The new page is long. It is structure in three sec-tions starting with Doc's original copy, followed by its addendum written by Brian. The last part is Brian's commentary with supporting data that breaks down what makes the WES paintings so unique.

This page has been updated and pictures have been re-edited using new methods that offers a much better look at this award winning paintings.

This page has been updated as part of our artwork page audit. The bonus is that examining the picture of this painting we noticed how perfecting it appeared to fit the Golden Spiral. We laid our golden spiral over the image and it lined up in such a way it is worth sharing.

This artwork page has been added to the list of complete works. It was one of the painting names we discovered in our audit of the So. Vermont Artist Assoc. brochures. Only, this painting was also very well reviewed by critic Royal Cortizzos making it stand out from the others.

This artwork page was updated as well and is believed to be related to the pastel above. Our image is terrible but it at least shows what the pastel above resembles.

Most of our efforts this month was on the WES essay honoring Dr. Mark. However, we still managed to update the following artwork pages.

Not that we haven't given you more than enough to keep you busy for at least the rest of winter... we do encourage you to visit, if you haven't already, some of Doc's Scrapbook essay we have updated and added new information...

We have updated this page with "new" pictures. New is in quotes because the pictures are not recent. In fact, they are nearly a decade old. They got lost in the mix somehow, and put aside only to get lost track of.

Better late than never, and the pics where taken with the same camera we still use today. The timing of it is also exciting because not only do we have great pictures of this beautiful painting, but it comes just after locating a contemporary friend from the same year, In the Sugar Bush.

Speaking of over looking something... neither Larch or Brian noticed for more than 15 years that this painting had been cut down by Woodward, and significantly so, by more than 40%. We illustrate to difference and how we made the discovery, along with some other new information.

This fell right in our lap as part of our artwork page audit. This painting, which we have no image of may be either (1) its own separate painting related to another known painting by its similar name... OR, (2) it does NOT exist at all. It might be a mistake similar to what we discuss with Old New England (Oil). A reporter or type-setter at the newspaper may have heard the name wrong... Nothing definitive so again we encourage you to read the story.

We have two known crayon drawing made by Woodward and when we say crayon, we mean crayon, not pastel or chalk. We do not know what prompted him to make the drawings but they are exceptionally well done. The crayons are not signed which makes sense. They were not done for professional reasons, yet, perhaps it was simply a matter of experimentation. We do not know.

As it is with the summary above, this page was updated as part of our audit of each and every artwork page. Some updates yield, new information, or disproves information previously posted.

Updated as part of our audit of each and every artwork page.

This is one of the best examples of correcting a long made error and this painting has finally found its true name. The error was made from a news-paper clipping where this canvas was the featured artwork. However, it was captioned "Landscape" and without more inform-ation, Dr. Mark felt com-pelled to stick with that until we learn otherwise, which we have... Read the story!

This new pastel came to us recently by way of a gallery that was selling it. You've seen the pictures because we announced the sale last month. It has since been sold and no longer available. How-ever, this artwork holds a particularly special place at a special time and its story says a lot about how RSW felt about it.

Below are 4 more of 19 newly discovered painting names found in an audit of Woodward's personal collection of Southern Vermont Artists Associ-ation exhibit programs not originally included in the Deerfield Academy's 1970 catalog of Wood-ward's work.

3- Oils

1- Pastel

AND here is another over-looked , but well regarded, painting from the 1928 Los Angeles County Museum exhibit:

1- Oils

The search is over! This painting that exhibited at Woodward's homecoming when he sent seven paintings to the 7th An-nual exhibition at Bradley Polytechnic Institute in Peoria, IL, a month after winning the Hallgarten First prize at the National Academy of Design's annual show. The artist attended the school from 1901 to 1904 receiving his high school diploma from there in 1902.

In 1977, Dr. Mark receiv-ed a letter from an art dealer giving him first shot at purchasing the painting, to which Doc had passed. Forty- seven years later it reappears and we have the pictures.

Of the seven paintings to hang at Bradley, we only know the names of four and now have pictures of three. The last holdout is the oil painting, Snow Pattern.

This painting has suffered one of the greatest injust-ices of any that we can think of in Woodward's entire oeuvre! Not only was it overlook by the artist but it was inexpli-cably forgotten entirely because it was mixed up with the painting below. Yet, this painting was featured in the Boston Herald's special Roto-gravure section taking half the page. Its caption was repeatedly quoted in numerous articles about RSW that followed for years after... But that is not the worst of the cri-mes, this painting won an award at a special exhib-ition a couple of years before its imposter was even made ⮞ Winter Pool... This painting is not really an imposter. It is very real, however, it was the painting Woodward remembered perhaps because it was purchas-ed by his patron-saint, Mrs. Ada Moore. What's more is that she had given it to her sister who passed around the time RSW was writing his painting diary. This piece got an entry and "Sil-ence" did not.The issue is Pool also got all of Sil-ence's credit as being the Rotogravure painting.

Would you believe that two of these three Evening Stream paintings are related to Winter Silence and Pool? They are! Woodward claims that Evening Stream #2 and #3 are the same scene as "Winter Pool" only reversed (and again slighting Silence). We took that challenge to see if he is right and reserved the pictures we have to compare. Spoiler, they are closer than we thought but not exact. This shocked us to a certain extent because we always took the artist to paint what he sees, as he sees it.

There was also some confusion whether there was really three paintings or two. We have settled all of that and updated all of the pages telling their individual stories.

⮜ Winter Pool was also given the credit for the Evening Stream paint-ings but it was not even made until after Evening Stream #2, making Silence the inspiration..

Caught in the fray of the Winter Pool controversy this page has also been updated. Here the issue is Woodward's claim for both paintings as being the first purchased by Mrs. Ada Moore. Our findings show that it is possible she bought both at the same time. Read page for more...

This artwork page was one of the only gallery audit pages we actually got to this past month. It has been updated and new pictures have been added from a recent visit we made to the property. There is still more work to do on some of the other material. Keep posted.

This is a NEW artwork page and its name has been added to Wood-ward's oeuvre. It was discovered in an article giving it a favorable ment-ion and description. What stood out about the review was how the critic focused on the "dark Redgate" paintings more so than the other landscapes.

It took almost six weeks but we have finally fix all of the pages effected by our software crash in Dec. '24. One of the cul-prits that caused the error was sorting out the three early sugaring paintings. This painting was to be #3 because it matched a photo of it hanging in a hotel lobby (more below)

... that is until, while work-ing on another project we find the ORIGINAL pic-ture by which we based our decision and learned that at some time, over the years, the picture mistakenly got squished making the painting look square when it was in fact rectangular!


It is not a hard thing to do, especially if you do not have the aspect ratio locked in your image editor. Still, when discov-ered and we began to re-name the files AGAIN we forgot that we still had the files opened in our html editor causing the crash. How it all got mixed up is explained in the artwork pages.

While it is not a race per se, this newly discovered canvas and the inform-ation we learned has forced us to rearrange the three paintings all using this same name. In fact, it was our attempt to do this, along with the realization we mixed up something just before we were about to upload our updates that caused the loss of 70% of the work we had done, as well as delaying our upload.

Early Sugaring's #2 and #3 are still not fixed and so we have to leave them out of this update. Still, that is okay because the new #1 we knew existed from an old slide, but did not know its name deser-ves it own spotlight and crown as the orginal 1920 painting named by the artist himself, Early Sugaring.

The most significant fall-out to the editing software crash are the two other paintings by the same name as this. We had hoped to present all three together for you this mon-th but new information for #2 and #3 were lost entirely. For expediency, we moved on for now.

This pastel recently came to us from its current owner and it is related to the oil painting, The Old Yellow House in Dover, however, it is not exact. There is a family sitting on the porch,the per-spective is wider and a little further back than the oil. Unique in its own right, this painting captures the age of the home very well.

Also related to an oil canvas is this pastel looking across the Deer-field River toward Buck-land's Purinton Hill, simi-lar to the subject found in Across the Winter River.

Woodward is not simply copying subjects to produce more paintings. There is a very good reason, he prided himself on making more afford-able art look as close to the high-end work of the oil canvases.

Just when you think it can't get better.. it does. We already had a good picture of this painting but had the opportunity to see it in person and we took it! Along with new pictures. We would be no where without the gracious kindness of their owners and our appreciation is immeasurable.

We made numerous visits at the invitation of the painting owners and we could not feel more blessed. We cannot express how much more amazing the paintings are in person. We never really do them justice on the website, no matter how hard we try!

For this piece was had an old, low resolution image that has now been upgraded to Hi-Res beauty.

The two paintings cited in this this table box are related. One has a painting diary entry and the other does not, despite being painting within the same year, of the same subject... One painting exhibited where the other did not, yet still, both have distinctly different sepia prints...

... in the diary remarks the artist attributes the year to the wrong paint-ing mixing it up with the other without even ac-knowledging there are two canvases while also adding it would be his second to last painting before retiring.

Very few endings are ever as graceful as we would like and Wood-ward's was no exception and so we find it comfort-ing to know his last two paintings were his favor-ite subjects: one old school and the other new.

Below are 4 more of 19 newly discovered painting names found in an audit of Woodward's personal collection of Southern Vermont Artists Associ-ation exhibit programs not originally included in the Deerfield Academy's 1970 catalog of Wood-ward's work.

3- Oils

1- Pastel

AND here are two over-looked , but well review-ed, paintings from the 1926 Lyman-Longfellow House exhibit:

2- Oils

You are going to have to scroll to see this new picture of this much loved painting. Its extreme aspect ratio makes it one of the most rectangular paintings in the artist's oeuvre but it is also an upright painting meaning it is tall- very tall. Woodward obviously liked Elm trees. He painted them several times including it in the painting names, Wide Spreading Elm, Dooryard Elm, The Hitchcock Elm and this piece, which was painted in historic old Deerfield area, as was the Hitchcock Elm.

How grateful are we to have these elms captured for history after the Dutch Elm disease ravaged the world of these majestic and glorious trees, except for a small town in Maine, Castine, where 300 American Elms survive to this day. It sounds like it is worth a visit.

This newly discovered pastel painting was the catalyst to our audit of all of the exhibit programs we have on record. First was the surprise that Mrs. Frelinghuysen bought a Beech Tree painting when, with just a few exceptions, she mostly purchased Vermont specific subjects. So we went looking in the programs to see if this one was missed, we found 20 missing names! Moreover, this pastel was not found in any of the SVAA programs, however, we do have one missing year out of 17 and that is 1936.

Similar to Under the November Sky, this pastel was purchased by Mrs. Frelinghuysen, by far Woodward's best customer. Second place is a distant, distant second by as much as 4 times. Most of her purchases were pastels we believe, because she held the medium in high esteem. Her mother, Louisine Havemeyer, who was close friends with renown American artist, Mary Cassatt, who along with her boyfriend Edgar Dugas, did great things with pastel and were well known for them.

We have had a picture of this pastel painting for a couple of years now but the glare from the glass over the painting was so distracting we deemed it unusable. However, re-cently we have develop-ed a technique to reduce the glare in pictures of paintings. It is tedious and takes numerous cyc-les of processing but we find that in the end it is worth it... You can still make out some of the features of the room it hangs, but now you can also see the painting itself without straining to ignore the glare.

Below are 5 of 19 newly discovered painting names found in an audit of Woodward's personal collection of Southern Vermont Artists Associ-ation exhibit programs not originally included in the Deerfield Academy's 1970 catalog of Wood-ward's work.

3- Oils

2- Pastels

We will call this "Brian and Larch's Excellent Adventure!" One day in the Buckland area with time to kill, the two set out to locate and see if they could find the rem-nant of the old Keach sugar house that appear-ed to hang precariously on a steep slope on Koo-chuag (Snow) Mountain.

A hundred years after the artist painted these paint-ings we found, what we believe is its exact loca-tion and took pictures with some new inform-ation.

For years, it was assumed that this was an interior painting much like In The Sugar House, however, it is no longer believed to be so. We now believe this painting is the EXTERIOR of the Gray Sugar House RSW was making when it got too cold and windy to paint outside and he was carried inside to warm up. That, of course, led to him making the pastel that would become the oil mentioned above.

Brian and Larch are getting pretty good at being able to get the most out of an old photograph and this is a good example. When Brian learned the pic we have is from an old photo taken in the early 1980s, he realized the problem with the picture was that it was over saturated with yellow from the room's lighting. He adjusted the saturation reducing the yellow to get a better representation and showed it to Larch. Larch took it further (to show Brian up, he believes) and worked on it some more to bring out the true reds, blues and purples. While it is still a 1980s picture and the best we have. It now looks much more like the original chalk drawing.

This page has been so long over due. We have known for some time now that the Bennington Church oil painting had a sibling chalk drawing but no page was ever made for it. We offer a theory as to why the chalk was made but fail to point out that the pastels often give RSW an accurate rendering of the colors he will replicate in oil. It is a useful tool.

The first of three new pastel painting discoveries. From its name we have a good idea what painting it is related to and where it exhibited - the Southern Vermont Artist Association (SVAA).

This discovery surprised us a bit. It was seen in the 1942 exhibit program for the SVAA, and while we know there is a painting that once hung in the Equinox Golf Club's dinning room of the ninth hole. We did not, however, know about this chalk drawing.

This chalk drawing is said to be of the Beech Tree in Heath. We are hoping for some pictures soon. We can't wait to see this piece painted in his favorite month.

In Woodward's diary comments, he claims this painting never left the studio until it was sold. However, this is contrary to the facts and it seems inexplicable as to why this would be. This painting hung, alone on its own wall,in a place of honor in a special exhibit in Springfield in Novem-ber 1944 that also featur-ed four other of the country's best painters. The issue may stem from the article we discover-ed... they botched Woodward's name! His middle name no less.

Also, we are finding more and more errors and omissions regarding the 1940s in the artist's painting diary that we have a theory about and will lead to an essay.

Add this painting to award winners! Again from an article we trans-cribed this week, we learn that this painting, which once hung in the London Embassy, is also an Award Winner. It won an Honorable Mention award at the 1941 annual Jordan Marsh Co. event. Again, not mentioned in his painting diary entry and inexplicably, the program for that year is missing from our collec-tion. We have added it to the Awards Gallery and updated the page to add the honor.

Again, this is another example of Woodward's painting diary falling just short on important information.

This page was updated because it was next in line in our audit project. Coinciding with the audit we had located an invit-ation to the re-dedication of East Poultney Church. Woodward was a popular guy with Vermont church-es in 1937. He has been commissioned by Francis P. Garvan to painting historic, architecturally and historical, churches. This was prompted by RSW's painting, Enduring New England, that has the original Marlboro Me-eting House building. It burned down the next year and its architect for the new meeting house used RSW's painting to help in his design and this bookplate honors his contribution.

We cannot even begin to explain how this new image of an unnamed painting got lost in the mix of things, but we have had it for at least a year. A new page was made for it and it simply fell through the cracks.

It is a unique painting made from a perspective not seen in any other canvas. It gives a terrific look of the landscape between Southwick and its neighbor to the north. RSW made numerous paintings of a similar scene but did so from his studio's artists north win-dow. In this piece, shows the gully separating the properties with Holsteins grazing on its slopes.

This page got updated as part of our ongoing audit and update of the website. Not all updates make this list. This canvas did for a couple of reasons, the first being, it is such a unique brush-style for the artist to use. It is actually very similar to the celebrated painting also in this monthly update, Snowing on the Hill, and minimalist for the artist known for his detail. It is very refreshing. We ALSO managed to pinpoint the location from where RSW positioned himself to make it.

Talk about two paintings having very different fortunes. Woodward con-sidered both among his masterpieces, yet one ended up never being sold and remaining in his personal collection. The other is one of his most traveled, recognized, and one of the most frequent-ly mentioned in news-papers at the shows it appears. It ends up in the collection of a famous person and eventually a museum. But the two paintings are #1 and #2 of the most exhibited Keach Farm-themed paintings, as well as, focused on the family home and NOT the farm.

The update of these two pages is a by-product of our work on the Keach barn interior paintings as we are in the midst of doing a complete ac-counting of the Keach-themed paintings.

The first of six, maybe seven painting's of the Keach barn interior. It is a pastel painting the artist called chalk drawings.

The second Keach barn interior painting is the largest and went into the private collection of a famous person in Boston. It is also the painting by which the next, smaller version, was made.

A smaller version of Old Rafters, this painting never exhibited and was kept by the artist in his personal collection. The reasons are unknown to us.

We believe this was made specifically for the Littlecote exhibit which was his first in Eastern New York and the new Myles Standish Hotel art gallery in Boston that followed. Another first, the Standish event would be the first of many shows at the hotel.

Of note, however, is that we needed to strike the entirety of Woodward's diary comments for this painting which he mistook for Old Rafters. We have found errors in the diary as we go through this process but for him to forget a painting equally as important to the one he is mistaking it for is a big surprise, even to us.

This pastel painting appears to have been made specifically for the show it appears, the 1931 Tryon Gallery Exhibit at Smith College. Much like the 1929 Pychon event where the artist featured chalk drawings with their oil counterparts. This piece hung with Dusty Rafters at Smith.

Nine years later this painting appears seem-ingly out of nowhere to hang at the Grand Cen-tral Art Gallery in New York City and Woodward makes no record of it in his diary.

This name/painting is as of now still unconfirmed.

Part of our brief J Gallery audit, it was the only artwork page in need of updating as the other four had been done prior to getting to the gallery. Nonetheless, we offer you a treat by adding pictures to the page showing what we believe to be the "falls" he painted in this interior woods painting.

Not only did we have this page listed in the wrong order, alphabetically, on the gallery page (we corrected it) but we believe there is enough evidence to conclude that this painting is not the same as the previously unnamed but now given a name by its owner Into the Woods.

There are two seasons for "haying time" and neither are in the Spring, yet the Spring was a pop-ular season for Wood-ward to paint at the Keach farm, all of which are exteriors. While we do not have a picture of this painting we offer you several options and even make one inconclusive suggestion of a strong possibility with what we feel is MORE than a coincidence.

These two paintings were included in our accounting of the Keach farm paintings. It turns out that both paintings were also popular with the reviewers. Last of Winter was called "arresting" by critic Royal Cortizzos, and critic Henry McBride admired all of the "enticing facts" of New England in November, so much so, he chose not to be hyper-critical of it being too much.

We have updated both pages to include the articles associated with these painting, as well as adding more pictures.

While examining the most exhibited paintings, this piece which is in the same collection as Keach's Stove, did not exhibit as much as Keach's Stove but it is where it hung that says all you need to know about how important it is, needed a refresher on it picture that had a distracting glare.

We used some of our new editing skills on the old picture and managed to reduce the glare and improve the image.

another painting in the same collection as Country Piazza and Keach's Stove with a terrible glare was corrected using our new editing methods. As of this moment, however, the image of Keach's Stove is the best it is going to get for now. We are working on getting a better image.

Back in January all of the attention was on the recently restored When Drifts Melt Fast. This painting is its sibling but facing down the steep hill on the road. It was also plagued with a terrible glare and we were able to reduce it without altering the color and look of the painting's true tones. We also updated the page.

This new gallery's idea was inspired, in part, by our "In November" gal-lery. The concept behind it is that Woodward was particularly interested in the moments just after the peak and before the impending change. We were not sure what would come of it. It really turned out more surprising than we could have imagined- 90 paintings making it one of the largest theme galleries on the website.

It is not perfect. We had to make some educated guesses. One of the key factors was, 'when did it exhibit?' If it hung at the So. Vermont Artist Assoc. in mid-August, it was not a late summer scene. If it exhibited in December, January, February or March thereafter- it was late summer.

This is embarrassing, but we have had a terrible picture of this painting on the website unnecessarily for so many years. That has been corrected.

Mining for a better image of this painting was the product of the "Late Sum-mer" gallery and our new found ways to locate Dr. Mark's original pictures, along with better methods of image editing. We wish we had a color image. It was a fav of the artist.

This is still a poor image because the original is poor, however, we got hold of its original scan and worked on it a bit. Hopefully, it helps give you a better sense of this "Late Summer" scene.

Again, another "Late Summer" scene, the first in a series of 3, maybe 4, similar paintings. It is still a blurry sepia, but that is because the negative we have is blurry. However, there was once a crisp negative of this painting because it was used twice in print and we included those images for you.

More of the same here... we got our hands on a better image of this sepia and made it better with our new techniques.

This pastel version of The Proud Elm also got an upgrade in quality with a more accurate color balance in a better high resolution.

The image of this painting, unfortunately is a copy of a copy. It was taken from an old faded photograph and up to now there was no way to get a higher resolution out of it. While the image is still poor you will clearly make out the sugar-shack seemingly located in the sugarbush. We had to do some homework as to the difference between a sugar grove and a sugar bush

It was our audit of this page that led us to the previous artwork above. Its name gave us a different picture in our heads than the articles describing it. This page was updated to included the definition of a sugar bush and some links.

This page was updated by our audit. It appears to be one of as many as six paintings inside the Keach barn; this painting being one of the earliest.

This painting was also part of our audit and while we did not need to make many changes, we included it here to draw your attention to what RSW said was, "One of my most perfect windows," along with an early color picture taken by his friend of the painting next to the arranged window!

This page was very outdated. We updated it to include RSW's best customer, Adaline Frelinghuysen.

Mislabeled as a chalk from the very beginning of the website. This paint-ing has been proven not only to be an oil but it is the painting we identified as New England in October just last month. It would make it the fourth painting in a series we thought stopped at three.

Lesson learned... there was one discrepancy when we linked a color picture to this painting name. Its current owner had done their won homework and traced the provenance back to its original buyer which dif-fered from the one RSW gives. Since we know of no example of RSW ever making such a mistake- we doubted the owner to our own embarrassment.

This painting and the one listed below have similar issue to that of Mountain Meadow and its sibling. It was also mislabeled a chalk drawing since the start of the website. Only for these two paintings, it is also likely that they are the same painting because we do not have the information we have for the other group. It complicates the matter that the difference is two transposed words.

Page undated to reflect the info above.

We found this new image in website founder Dr. Mark's copious volume of file folders. The image is a higher resolution than the previous but you will see that the problem with quality was not just the low-res image. This painting might be one of the artist earliest "hill road" pieces. Also found with the old sepia are two photos of the luxurious room it once hung. It is a great treat, enjoy!

The painting is still listed as unnamed as we work to confirm our suspicions.

As we always promise, we do all we can to get the best possible pictures of Woodward's work. It is not always possible. We publish what we have primarily to locate the paintings. Countless painting owners have reached out to supply new pics. While still not perfect, this pic is better than the previous.

Another find from the depth of Dr. Mark's records and it is much better than the previous.

We are not even a third of the way through web-site founder, Dr. Mark's file folders and we have caught so many trea-sures. This pic we grab-bed from a torn photo-graph of someone's home. We believe it was taken by RSW friend, F. Earl Williams. It is not the best image, BUT, one can clearly see that it is of what RSW called "the farmyard" along side of the "little red barn" from a perspective unlike any other painting of the same subject.

As much as we love redundancy, we have been trying to eliminate having double artwork pages for the same paint-ing. Usually, this results from the painting's name being changed later either by Woodward, for whatever reason or be-cause the owner has a name they like. None-theless, for this artwork we will two pages for the piece, for now...

... the new picture while better is still not great. However, this one has much better color bal-ance than the previous one.

This image is the same as the previous one, only with a much higher resol-ution. The biggest ob-stacle with the new web-site (2009) is that all of the original scans of let-ters A through I, were cor-rupted in their original PowerPoint slides made by Dr. Mark (2002). We have been trying to re-cover them somehow for years. But there may be a light at the end of this tunnel. We are finding some of the lost prints in Dr. Mark's file folders and we just located a cashe of old CDs!!! Cross your fingers.

Not only did we find a new better picture in Dr. Mark's files of this painting we have known of since the website's beginnings. We found a way to edit it so that we can now tell you what it is, if not what its name is.

A new high resolution sepia print image along with new thoughts as to why this is only one of no more than a handful of chalk drawings sepias.

It was also updated as part of our website audit where we are now in the "I" gallery, as is the one listed below...

This page was updated as part of the website audit we are performing.

Coincidentally enough, just a day or two after we did an audit of this page did someone email us a photograph of this painting signed and given as a gift by the artist! We have added the picture and provided some information as to the connection of the gift's recipient and the artist.

The next painting on the list for our audit turned out to be much more than we expected. This is the first of 3 very similar com-posite paintings made by Woodward between the winter of 1942 and some-time in late 1944. All three paintings are differ-ent sizes. Each one has tiny variations and differ-ences in the scenes that prompted us to update a total of 5 web pages which led to the discovery of two new images as well as the swapping of names of two images we incorrectly labelled years ago.

The second painting of this series of similar scenes put together by Woodward using two other paintings was intended for the same customer as the first and it was still not sold. Woodward drastically changed the perspective. He altered both the tree grouping to the left and stonewall on the right for a more dramatic effect.

However, we had used the wrong image to identify this painting because of how similar it is to the THIRD painting of the same scene with a slightly different perspect-ive and size! RSW gives us just enough inform-ation on each painting for us to put it all together.

Researching the issue above we found a new and better sepia image swapping it out with the old one.

Minor updates were made and added.

The third and more tempered painting of Woodward's composite series using the farm from Just After Haying Time and the road of Wind'll Blow Hill to paint this very romantic scene. It was not until we did an overlay of the two images we had of these painting did we discover we had them mixed up according to RSW's painting diary.

There has always been confusion surrounding this painting that border-ed on an existential crisis- it is or is it not a painting? Well, we have confirmed that it is. Not only that, we sort out the whole mess that is Woodward's Bos-ton paintings to learn that there are 6 Old Boston paintings, of 2 different scenes all exhibiting between 1931 and '35.

This painting is one of 3 of the same scene seen in the chalk drawing by the same name, In Old Boston. This was estab-lished after discovering this piece hung with the pastel at the Mt. Holyoke College event in 1931.

Three paintings, 2 oils and this chalk, all with basically the same name, does not make it easy on us to figure out what is what in regard to the Boston paintings but thank goodness RSW kept this pastel for himself. Otherwise we would have no idea what there is a second scene the artist also painted in oil as well.

This page was updated to reflect the new inform-ation established by the exhibition list. However, we did add a cool feature illustrating an image of the scene from In Old Boston, chalk, to make a list of all of the art work in the order we believe they were made and identify-ing what is the subject of the painting- - neighbor-hood or oyster house.

This painting owned by the estate has deterior-ated so much over the past decade it was pack-ed and stored until we could get it restored. One of the artist most cele-brated paintings, it was never sold and the rea-son may very well have been because RSW knew it would not last the test of time.

We have new pictures and illustrations that demonstrate the evolu-tion of this painting from a 40" x 50" to its current size of 24" x 36" along with before and after images.

A painting name we have no image for and only one record of (a news-paper article) comes into question. Is it really a painting or was the name mistaken for another painting omitted from the article? While we could not come to any answer with confidence, the questions tell an interest-ing story that links two paintings made at the same location, roughly at the same time- one with an unquestioned name and the other, nameless. The nameless one could very well be the painting by this name only we have no way of confirm-ing it.

We recently came across a picture of this painting's sepia print that is better than the one we were using. It was found in the pictures Larch took during his visit to the Smithsonian a couple of years back. It was found in the "Harold Grieve" papers of Woodward's collection.

We have updated the pictures, including a never before used photograph of Woodward at his desk taken by his friend F. Earl Williams, also in the Smithsonian. We also link the scene to two other paintings.

As part of our artwork page audits we are also re-thinking the inform-ation we have for each piece and connecting it with other related pieces. For this 1946 painting, sold to the artist dear friend Ethel Dow, the related piece is a sketch made of the same scene sometime in the mid-1930s. RSW mentions in his painting diary that Ethel had been saving for several years to buy a painting and that this one, "seemed to hold her choice of 'everything'," and we are wondering if he had arranged this all intentionally? Read the story and see how we put a few things together indicating a poetic fate.

This page has been reorganized and updated, however, there is now a question as to here the name came from because a label on the stretcher has a different name.

A painting name with no image, but not hard to surmise the subject and scene of the painting we suspect might have been made special for Wood-ward's first Smith College exhibition.

Another painting name with no image. Still, we offer some possibilities of what the subject of this chalk drawing may be...

The moment the idea came to us we realized it was necessary, for context, to assemble an image gallery solely devoted to Woodward's award winning paintings. There are twenty that we know of in his 37 year career. Two paintings won two awards each making it actually 18 total paintings. We pictures of 18 of the winners, and one is an image of a smaller version of the original. We also include the 3 paintings invited to 3 World Fairs as well as the four paintings to hang at the 1938 International Rotary Convention held in Boston.

One of only two multiple prize winning paintings by Woodward, this particular one held pretty high ex-pectation from the artist. In his painting diary he referred to his Honorable Mention prize at the Jordan Marsh show as "miserable" and made NO mention whatsoever of his First Prize for Best Still Life at the annual Ogunquit, Maine, exhib-ition. Oqunquit and Jordan Marsh are two of maybe just a handful of the most esteemed events in New England attracting the best of the best artist regionally and nationally. To receive any prize from either is a high and esteemed honor.

We have added new in-formation concerning the 1932 Boston Art Club ex-hibition. An article by art critic Alice Lawton offers new context to the im-portance of Woodward's 2nd prize.

The other double prize winning painting doesn't offer much in new inform-ation but deserves a fresh look.

A quick search of the buyer of this prize winning painting unearth yet another prominent owner whose name and occupation Woodward incorrectly cited in his painting diary. We made the correction and added new material to the page.

It has never been known what painting won 2nd Prize and the 1937 Albany Institute of History & Art event. Our research has revealed it was this painting. Not only that, Woodward was the only non-Hudson Valley artist invited to the show which was also exclusively held for artist who qualified for the The WPA Federal Art Project. We know Woodward qualified, however, to this day we do not know what he did with the grant, if anything.

We had the great pleas-ure to visit the So. Ver-mont Art Center (SVAC) in Manchester, VT. They are in possession of an early Woodward painting and the SVAC's Exhibi-tions Manager Alison Crites extended us the courtesy of pulling it out of storage for us to see and photograph. We learned some puzzling things that has left us in a bind as to what to do about it which is a good problem to have.

Thank you so much to Ms. Crites, the SVAC, and its accommodating and friendly staff!

We found an old color image of what we assum-ed to be The Village in Spring (1). Only after a lot of work did we realize: It was NOT. Moreover, it can't be April in North Hadley (2) either because that painting is the origi-nal painting cut down to be renamed The Village in Spring! The chalk drawing, The Village in Spring, (3) was believed to be mislabeled in an article, which we now believe was actually referring to the image we found. Leaving its name to be- April in the Village (4) once believed to be the mixed up name of the chalk and not a real painting. Phew...

When we began to update and make new discoveries regarding this work of art we also reached out to its owner who we had not had contact with in nearly 16 years. It was a shot in the dark. We weren't sure any of our information would still be good. We posted our changes and promoted them only to receive new images a few days later. Thank you so much!

This painting recently appeared on an art website. No name was given for it. It was refer-red to generically as "Winter Landscape." Yet, we had a corresponding sepia print labeled, Winter Peace. Unfortunately, there are 3 paintings by that same name. One is definitely not this painting leaving two others. However, this one does not match RSW's diary comment. Go to the page for more!

In the process of correcting two broken links on the New Silo artwork page we needed to check other related pages, which included reviewing an essay written by this website's founder, Dr. Mark Purinton in 2006. It has held up well over time. We did not have anything to add to it. The page just needed a reform-atting with some of the new tools we use throughout the website. I (Brian) informed Larch what I was doing and he (Larch) tells me he just came across new material his father wrote to add to the Silo page!

We love these sort of coincidences. We have had quite a few lately. They always leave us feeling like we are on the right path. Doc's new information is quite in-formative, educational, and entertaining. What's best about these changes is that they were inspired by visitors to the website who helped him with additional facts, for which we are most grateful.

We have known about this pastel painting for some time but we had NO idea what it could possibly entail. More than that, we believed the name was wrong. Did you know that there was once a wharf at the end of North Boston's Long Wharf? Or that it was called the "T" Wharf? We didn't. Also, we were under the impression it was made the year Woodward stayed in Bos-ton for a month- nope try again. Enjoy this read.

We are digging deep into the mountains of folders and files collected since the start of the website. The objective is multifaceted, however, one of the primary objectives is to find images once thought lost forever. This is one of those photos. More over, this is one of Woodward's favorite subjects and this piece the prize of the 3 we know and probably the couple of others we suspect exist.

We erred here... the sepia print we believed was an unnamed artwork was in fact the sepia print for After Rain.

Despite our embarrass-ment (we swear we look over everything we could think of) we want to thank the friend who caught the mistake and notified us. Thank you!

This sepia print of a painting was mislabeled a long time ago as the sepia for a painting named Aged Roofs. We recently found a better scan of the print and realized it was NOT Aged Roofs but an entirely different and unknown painting. Aged Roofs is a spring painting whereas this is a late summer scene. The better pic allowed us to see the sky was very different. It is the only "unnamed" paint-ing of the Halifax House we have.

It surprises us sometimes what we lose track of, such as a much better picture of a painting than what is currently on the website. This is one of those times... we recently came across an image of this painting from a few years ago that far exceeded the old, low resolution, image we had on its page. In updating the page we realized some other things missed when we last updated it over a year ago. Primarily, what makes it special in both time and space.

This new image of the 40" x 50" oil painting comes to us from the Southern Vermont Art Center in Manchester, VT. The painting was gifted to them by a close friend of the artist. It is a wintry and dramatic scene of the Keach Farm from a distance precar-iously hanging along the side of the hill. What is great about it is that it shows the entirety of the farm and we created a graphic linking the buildings to various paintings.

As part of our update of the artwork pages, we are adding whatever context we can find connected to the artwork. For this painting we have discovered clue suggest-ing that this painting may be more important than realized. First RSW gives us his most detailed diary entry describing the piece, there is no evid-ence it exhibits, and then he sells it to a VIP just months after his Heath Studio burns...

This 20" x 40" painting has the distinction of being one of Woodward's rarest 1937 to 1945 ex-periments. The artist was toying with assembling paintings using combin-ations of other paintings. He made a series of wide panoramic paintings which had become the fashion of the time to hang on the mantle over the fireplace. This paint-ing is one of only five and his most ambitious that has a link to another that did not work at all.

This artwork page has been updated and we learn from Woodward's diary comments that it is similar to Out of the Past. Only this version was sent to his friend Harold Grieve on the West Coast to sell. This was something the artist did when he had a subject worthy painting and the original was bought by a highly regarding VIP.


See also: Out of the Past for the VIP.

The advantage to going back and lending a criti-cal eye to each and every artwork page is just how much a fresh look can reveal. This pastel is a great example. Not only were we able to connect it to another, better known pastel and the same farm but the two paintings appear the same year, exhibit to-gether at the same show, and follow a similar traj-ectory across the country to land in the same state through different owners!

This chalk drawing comes to us from its own-er with a story that it was a wedding gift, given in 1915. There is no reason to doubt the story. For one thing, Woodward loved personalizing his gifts. For another, al-though oil paintings dom-inate our attention, the pastel paintings were there from the beginning in 1918 and getting more praise.

A trip to Stockbridge to visit their public library, and have some lunch at the country store of the Rockwell mural of Main St. fetched us a new picture of this painting. It also revealed some other things that clears up some confusion and confirmed other things.

This is the OLDEST (1921-'22) known painting of the Beech Tree on Burnt Hill in Heath, MA... by years. Read the story!

If it has not become ob-vious yet, it soon will. We are making a concerted effort, in part as tribute to Paul Harvey's, "... and now you know The REST of the Story," feature of his radio program to look at the backstory of certain paintings for greater context.

This painting is at the crux of an issue that plagues Woodward's lasting legacy in misunderstanding concealing his true interest.

This was updated a couple of months ago as part of our efforts to bring together and link exhibitions with their articles. This is one of those paintings that because we do not have the greatest of pictures, it gets neglected. If you do not know this, Woodward did not like neglect and so we gave this page some love. We connect it to another, better image we have of the same barns from a different angle along with the praise it got in a newspaper clipping.

With no image of this painting, it is one of the overlooked but its name is important, or rather we say opalescence is important to Woodward. But that is another story for another time. What is of import on this page is its role in drawing our attention to Woodward's handling of the situation AFTER his Hiram home and studio fire. On this page is the article where he addresses the rumors and misinformation being published in defense of his reputation.

Since the beginning of the website, this painting's name was listed as "Grey NE" due to contradicting inform-ation. The evidence was looking us right in the face but it was from a traditionally inaccurate source. It took us a while to comb through all of the information we have and found enough evidence to change the name and we share the story with you.

  We have long suspected that the names of both these paintings are related to the Golden Ratio more than the season of autumn (though still related). But the Golden Ratio (based on the Fibbiaci Sequence showing the natural proportions of distribution found in nature). Proportion is important to composition and you will find the aspect called the Golden Spiral in a large number of beautiful art work. Woodward is no exception to this, only with these two paintings the spiral is notably intentional, thus the name.

  We were inspired to illustrate the spiral found in these paintings when a woman visiting the 2022 Memorial Hall Museum exhibit with her daughter. Standing in front The Golden Slope, took her hand and traced the air in front of the painting revealing the spiral to her child. What surprised us was this same woman, with her daughter in tow, did the same thing with at least five paintings also on display. Today, we have identified as many as 60 others. Expect a Scrapbook page soon!

Another one of those painting stories that has an odd journey... from being bought by the new owner of the Halifax (VT) House, to being returned to Woodward, it's exhibition record, being part of the October 1946 issue of American Artist, to selling again at the Founder's Show of the Grand Central Art Gallery in New York City.

We are making an effort to offer some greater context to Woodward's early work. One of those facets is his interest in making Illuminations. It is an art form with a long history and tradition tied to the undercurrect of Woodward's faith and aspirations. It is important not to underestimate how powerful its draw is to him. It is primordial in its origin.

This painting's story is almost comically tragic. It is a personal favorite of RSW's. Its buyer dies just days before its comple-tion. It exhibits at a show with another painting of a familiar subject by a fri-end of Woodward's that gets more attention as well as RSW's ire. It is the first incident of RSW's defense of his brand from being co-opted by others.

In the first of what will be 3 parts, we introduce to you the evolution of Woodward's well-known and highly recogizable Window Pictures Paintings. Part I is primarily a build up, revealing the first "window" drawing we know of and how the letter that accompanies it holds many of the traits and values RSW will incorporate into his Window Picture Paintings nearly twenty years later. But that is not all! We will share with you who we believe is their inspiration and how she literally and later figuratively appears in the original paintings perhaps as a tribute to her if only unconsciously so. We will also connect RSW's early commercial work and intimate Redgate paintings as the being precursor to the art form.

When we heard that the Deerfield Academy was going to level the "little brown house" on Albany Street we took another look at this page and introduce the artist romantic tendencies.

We've added new clippings and some editorial commentary.

This is an important scene for Woodward only we are not entirely sure why. We suspect it holds an underlying poetic irony, a tragic one. Its story has prompted us to begin an essay exploring its mysteries but for now... enjoy our page update featuring Jeanette Matthews beautiful reviews.

In this story, we call Woodward out on being misleading. He claims "it never sold" but the truth is that he never found the right home for what maybe one of the most celebrated and beloved paintings in his entire oeuvre. Read the story of this award-winning painting and see if you agree...

Woodward made a num-ber of small errors in his Painting Diary. He didn't start the diary until the early 1940s and so a lot of it was from memory. In regard to this painting, however, he may have made his most egregious mistake. It was the wrong painting entirely! More surprising is who OWNS this painting.

It all adds up... the size matches, where it exhibited matches, and the good fortune of discovering a photograph from the 1928 exhibit where this painting is hung next to a known 40" x 50" painting is all we needed to prove this painting is the one on the cover of Country Life Magazine.

We have received a few newly discovered paint-ings through their owners who graciously send us their pictures. This signed but unnamed painting is an early 1920s oil on canvas. It is very unique in that it shows a slop-ing field being hayed and you can just make out the work horses and cart use to do it.

In our greatest indulg-ence yet, we explore what this painting could possibly be since we have no image of it. Furthermore, we also speculate on the sym-bolism that may be ap-pealing to Woodward that holds great meaning to the artist. It is part of our effort to explore a more intimate look inside his interest.

Our work in processing all of the news clippings and articles in Woodward's scrapbook is producing opportunities to reveal some things about paintings for which we have no images. This is a great example, and we offer two insights of import to its name and month.

More on our effort to get all the article in RSW's scrapbooks to the web-site, here we paid special attention to this chalk drawing. Jeanette Matt-hews of the Springfield Republican is a great art reviewer and one of our favorites. Note what she says about this painting...

We are making every effort to update many of the Scrapbook pages originated by Dr. Purinton. Here we add some new perspectives on Miss Mabel touting her as one of Woodward's best customers despite her limited resources. Something RSW's greatly appreciated.

We had the great plea-sure to be invited to take new pictures of this un-named and unsigned painting. There is a ques-tion as to if it is a finished piece. There are missing details RSW would have normally filled in. It was sold after his death by his family.

You may have already seen this painting of Woodward's Hiram Woodward Place barn and yard just after a snow storm because it appear-ed as the featured art-work for the month of February in this year's Buckland Historical Society's calendar.

If you want to know how special a painting was to Woodward- look at where he exhibited it. In one of the best examples of a painting being over-looked, this is it. This page best illustrates how important our work to fully vet and add all the in-formation we have on where a painting hung.