Featured Artwork:December Farm, A Winter Sketch

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

A closer look at the title of this chalk

The Pynchon Gallery Exhibition, 1929, is one of the few exhibitions that featured Woodward's "Crayon Drawings." As many as 13 were reported to be exhibited and this website is not aware of any exhibit that featured more than this number. The Deerfield Academy, 1932 Exhibition featured 10 drawings.

December Farm, a Winter Sketch, is specially mentioned by Springfield Republican art reviewer, Jeanette Matthews.

Springfield Republican, 1929

Springfield Republican, 1929, by Jeanette C. Matthews

"'December Farm, a Winter Sketch,' is modern in spirit and design. All the crazy outbuildings of a hillside farm; including an angular not a circular silo, and viewed at an angle that ranges them down two sides of a triangle stand bleaky here in the most cheerful winter sunlight. It may be a hard, incomprehensible world, but there is always sunlight- in New England."

What is even more interesting, aside from Woodward making several "copies" of it, is its relationship to the oil painting December Farm.December Farm is a mystery because it was a personal favorite of Woodward's and hung in his home for nearly 30 years, yet there are no records of it in the artist painting diary or of it ever exhibiting. So we do not now the year or where it was painted. We do not know if it was painted before the sketch above or after.

A close up of the crops in December Farm.
Note the flatbed truck parked inside the barn.
The truck is notably absent in the sketch.

You can read more about this on the December Farm page, but the general gist of our theory of this chalk is that it was made weeks after the devastating stock market crash in 1929 and shows the farm now seemingly abandoned. If this is the case, then that would make this chalk drawing and scene an editorial piece depicting the fallout of the depression era.

There is a series of other, what we call "editorial pieces", made by Woodward beginning in March/April of 1929 when the first significant signs of emending financial disaster was inevitable, Genial Old House, Chalk, 1929, to the weeks following Black Tuesday, Oct. 29, 1929, with this chalk drawing and Country Piazza, 1929. Ironic enough is that the height of Woodward's career would be during the depression and he turned his focus from time to time to portray a home or a farm, and people during this difficult period culminating in his painting, Passing New England, in 1937.