RSW's Diary Comments

Painted before 1929. This was one of several I made for Mrs. Wm. H. Moore when she agreed to own one of my paintings, although she eventually bought Road Guardians from Conway Road. Painted on Town Farm Hill in Buckland just below old town farm. Upright."

Comments on the back of a sepia print:

"Bright yellow-green, with dark bronzy-green for hemlocks, and foreground, rose-color."

"Exhibited at the Myles Standish Galleries, Boston, Mass."

We do not have an image of Road Guardians.
Still, Maple Guardians (c.1952) is believed to be
very similar in subject and likeness.

Editor's Note:

We need to add that the diary comments above are incomplete. The artist wrote most all of it from memory and thus was inconsistent in his information. Along with Road Guardians, and the painting above, he sent the painting, Winter Pool, a painting made from another canvas he completely forgot, despite its greater success, Winter Silence. In both diary entries for Road Guardians and Winter Pool, Woodward claims each were the first to be purchased by Mrs. Moore which is true. She did buy both canvases, however, she kept Road Guardians, and gifted Winter Silence to her sister in Chicago.

Boston Globe, May, 1929, by A. J. Philpott.

"....May Woods is charming in its color and luminosity--and in its whole character."

Boston Sunday Post, May 13, 1929
Woodward's first featured exhibition at Myles
Standish Gallery and his second in Boston.

The Myles Standish Hotel was very important to Woodward. Opening in 1928, Woodward would hold his second one-man show in Boston in the hotel's art gallery within first year in May of 1929. This exhibition, and his 1931 show would be well received and reviewed by Boston's top two art critics of the day -- A. J. Philpott of the Boston Globe and Albert Franz Cochrane of the Boston Evening Transcript.

During the enitre duration of the hotel's lifespan, Woodward usually had a painting hanging somewhere inside the building. If not in the gallery, than the lobby. If not the lobby, a painting would be hanging in the dining room of its restaurant.

As far as hotel's go, the Standish's life was short lived. Not only did it open shortly before the Great Depression hit, but the shear length of the depression was ultimately its undoing as well. The final days of the hotel's operation, around 1944, Woodward, perhaps in the hope of saving the hotel, put together one last exhibition featuring 20 oil paintings and 7 chalk drawings - many of which were his personal favorites - as well as other fine paintings owned by his influential friends, like Mrs. Moore, Scott Fitz, and the King family, the Lunts, etc. The hotel would close sometime after (we could not find a single reference to the actual day or year) and reopened in 1949 as the Myles Standish Dormitory, Boston University's first dorm.

The Myles Standish Hotel building today,
now a dormitory for Boston University.

Let's not overlook Mrs. Ada Moore who entered RSW's life somtime after his Redgate Studio fire and took over the burden of his financial cost due to his physical state of paralysis leveling the playing field. She for all intents and purposes, sponsored his career. So for this painting to be made for her and ALSO be hung at the last exhbition of the Myles Standish Hotel indicates what it meant to him.

Mrs. Ada Small Moore

In 2007 this painting underwent restoration at Williamstown.