Featured Artwork: May Clouds (not named by Woodward)

Full Bloom: This painting also first exhibited in
1931 and it has a four year gap with no exhibit records
at all. At one time we feared that the painting pictured
below at Myles Standish had the same name. We did
not imagine its name gave little clue to its subject.

Editor's Note:

If it were not for this painting, gifted to a cousin, an old picture from one of Woodward's scrapbooks and a blurb from an article on the February 1931, Myles Standish Gallery exhibition; we would have never discovered the painting we now know as White Clouds is the same subject. We have known the name for sometime and imagined it was a "big sky" scene over some pasture, not a reference to two apple trees in bloom mirroring the sky above it.

White Clouds was actually very well reviewed but none of the remark gave us an adequate description of the subject, that is, until we found the following from the Boston Globe, February, 1931: "..."There are flowers too, and blossoming fruit trees like the 'White Clouds' of the sky." For more see below ⮟

A picture from one of RSW's scrapbooks. For the longest
time we could not pinpoint which exhibit this was because we
could only identify one painting, In Old Boston. But when we
manipulated the photo to reduce the glare coming from the win-
dows behind the drapes, we began to see the "A" of the left tree
and the "Y" of the tree on the right we recognized the scene as
the same one as what you see above. Now we just need a name.
That came from the article cited and we identified the painting
on the right to be Winter Barn and the rest fell into place.

⮜ This photo to the left is from Woodward's oldest scrapbook covering the earliest years of his career up to around 1931. It is accompanied by two other pictures from what appears to be the same gallery. The pictures were not labeled but by identifying as many of the paintings as we could, it soon became clear it was the Myles Standish Gallery in Boston's Kenmore Square.

The problem was that we could not narrow down which exhibit in 1931 because Woodward had a series of shows that year. There were two in February, the next in March, and finally another in June. Only a handful of paintings out of 58 total hung at more than one show and White Clouds was one of them. The problem is that only one picture matched our records and that is the one to the left for the first February event. White Clouds only hung with In Old Boston and Winter Barn that one time.

We also used our editing software to verify the size of each painting just to make sure we had the right paintings because White Clouds is slightly bigger and more square than Winter Barn but in the picture it is slightly skewed an thus not definitive. Verifying the size to our records was important because Woodward did make multiple versions of similar scenes but varied them in size to be just different enough. If the painting above was signed, we would believe it was White Clouds.