"Horizon of Heath. 27 X 30, Fall of 1947. The beech tree in Heath, with a band of deep blue hills back of it and scrubby pasture with gray ledges and pasture road in foreground. Painted in early October, just a flush of fall color in the blue hills. Beach tree tawny and browning; foreground yellow and browned, and ochre, with just touches of dull red foreground grass pale ochre. The sky (3/4 of the canvas) a tangled mass of gray autumn clouds, with just a few small patches of blue showing. Sold, January, 1951 to Dr. and Mrs. William B. Terhune, New Canaan, CT."
This is about as detailed a diary comment as you are going to get from Woodward.
Because we do not know when he wrote the diary entry we wonder if perhaps it is as detailed as it is because
it was written sometime after the Pasture House in Heath burned in 1950.
We also do not think
its sale to the Terhunes is an accident either. We suspect Woodward sold it to them because he has known them
for many years through their connection to Stockbridge, MA, the Austin Riggs Foundation, and Woodward's
close friend Dr. Lawrence K. Lunt.
See the Additional Notes Section for more...
Part of our effort to give deeper context to Woodward's career, one being
the pattern of his actions, and for another... researching his customers when we have a name. Here we have a highly regarded
doctor of psychiatry. A simple Google search yielded 797,000 results and atop of that query was his
New York Times Obituary. We learn he was a founding member of Yale University's Psychiatry Department, but it was the
synopsis of the third result that jumped out to us. Dr. Terhune's name next to the name, Austen Riggs Foundation and Dr. Austen
Fox Riggs. The connection is made from the correspondence held in the
Archives at Yale website under the "Elizabeth Cutter Morrow papers regarding Dwight W. Morrow, Jr." From
there it was a series of links to his books for sale online, additional obituaries in a variety of newspapers.
If you
are not familiar, the Austen Riggs Foundation owns a Woodward painting (The Brook)
purchased in the early 1920s. The facilitator of that sale is none other than Woodward's close friend and advocate, Dr. Lawrence
K. Lunt, whose first job after becoming a doctor of psychiatry just so happened to be the Austen Riggs Foundation in Stockbridge,
MA. Lunt also facilitated the subscription campaign that led to the Stockbridge Public Library's purchase of the painting,
The Lone Tree. The Lone Tree is the earliest known painting of the
Beech Tree on the Heath Pasture. Also, note that Dr. Lunt was living in Wyoming in the 1950s. We are not suggesting he connected
Dr. Terhune to Woodward in 1951. We are saying that Woodward was introduced earlier and continued a relationship.
What makes this "coincidence" of special interest to us is the timing of the sale and
to whom the painting was sold. It is literally just a few months removed from the fire that destroyed the Pasture House in Heath.
Woodward had owned the property since 1938, but had been visiting it since the early 1920s, if not even earlier than that! Yet,
this painting was made in the fall of 1947 and we have NO record of it ever exhibiting. Furthermore, the artist is also a year away
from reluctantly putting down his brush and retiring. This holds of all the ingredients that suggest just how special this painting
is to Woodward and how he was particular with where certain paintings went and who owned them.
It is also important to
mention that when Woodward discovered the Pasture House fire. According to
Dr. Mark who was with him. Woodward said to turn the car around and go home. Heartbroken he never went back to the
property.
Dr. Terhune wrote 2 popular books, Emotional Problems and What You Can Do About Them; First Aid to Wiser Living and Living Wisely and Well: a Discussion of Techniques of Personal Adjustment. He also published an academic book The Integration of Psychiatry and Medicine and a manual on psychiatric nursing Postgraduate Work in Psychiatric Nursing.