Quick Reference

Time Period:
Prior to 1930

Location:
Hog Hollow Road
Buckland Center, MA

Medium:
Oil on Canvas

Type:
Landscape

Category:
Farms

Size:
40 X 50

Exhibited:
Boston Tercentennial Celebration
Exhibition, 1930
    > Award: Gold Medal
The Copley Society, 1930
Myles Standish Galleries, 1931, '34
Smith Coll. Tryon Gallery, 1931
Mt. Holyoke Coll. Dwight Hall, 1931
Amherst Coll. Jones Library, 1932
Stockbridge (MA) Public Library, '32
Macbeth Galleries (NYC), 1932
Springfield Art league, 1932
Williston Academy, 1933
Northfield Seminary, 1933
Deerfield Valley AA, 1933
Syracuse (NY) MFA, 1934
Concord (MA) Art Association, '34
Boston AC, Symphony Hall 1935
Myles Standish Hotel, 1935- '45

Purchased:
Unknown

Provenance:
Yes, Click Here

Noteworthy:

This canvas was awarded only one of only four gold medals given at the Boston Tercentenary Exhibition of N. E. Paintings held at Horticultural Hall. Two medals went to portrait artist and the third to a sculptor.

Related Links

Featured Artwork: New England Drama


RSW's Diary Comments


New England Drama, Sepia
New England Drama, Sepia

"From mowing edge above the house of Goddard's farm looking toward Buckland village and the mountains of Town Farm Hill. Made a smaller painting and a chalk drawing of the same subject. A painting exhibition. Sent to decorate dining room at the Myles Standish Hotel in Boston where they think so much of it they have kept it for a number of years (writing 1941). Except for occasional times, I have taken it away for exhibition, the last time in Jan., 1941, for an exhibition of Prize Paintings staged in New York by the Grand Central Art Galleries."

Comments on a sepia print:

"The only photograph I send of one of my very large canvases, a 40 x 50. Very dramatic in whites and grays and violets. This canvas was awarded the gold medal of honor at the Boston Tercentenary Exhibition of N. E. Paintings held at Horticultural Hall a few years ago. It has hung for some time in the dining room of the Myles Standish Hotel on Beacon Street where they beg to let it remain, but I can obtain it anytime I wish. This canvas has 'nearly' sold a dozen times but not quite. I have no idea you might wish such a large canvas but I send it as a matter of interest."


Additional Notes

Letter to the Editor of New York Herald Tribune,
December 30, 1932

After many years of deterioration in the artist's studio, in 2004 this painting underwent complete restoration at the Williamstown Regional Art Conservation Laboratory, Inc. in Williamstown, MA . It is currently in excellent condition. It has been donated to the Town of Buckland and now hangs in a prominent place in the second floor meeting room in the Buckland Town Hall.


Springfield Sunday Union and Republican, April 26, 1931

"He won the gold medal awarded by the Boston tercentenary art show for New England Drama, which shows a group of farm buildings on a hillside almost buried under snow."



Post Standard, Feb. 5, 1934. Art Chat. The Paintings of Robert Strong Woodward, by Anna W. Olmsted

"...Center of the main wall is the stately NEW ENGLAND DRAMA, a snowscape that is dramatic indeed; snowbound but not desolate. For there's sun on the snowy roofs of a farmhouse and its barns rambling along a mountain slope. A curl of smoke from a diminutive red chimney rising toward the cold sky suggests life and warmth within--a masterly canvas. And one is not surprised to note the brass plate which proclaims a gold medal, won at the Boston Tercentenary..."



Boston Herald, May 25, 1930, by F. W. Coburn

".....a sturdy well-fixed little farm house under a huddle of fluent hills, is epical and stirring."



The House and Farm today
The House and Farm today

The Breeze, June 5, 1931

"Many Bostonians admired his New England Drama when it was shown at the Boston Tercentenary Fine Arts Exhibition. It shows a substantial country home, with its rambling sheds and barns zigzagging across the foreground beyond a winter-stripped apple tree. There is no feeling of desolation, or even of isolation, as the friendly hills lift their snow-covered and tree-patterned shoulders beyond and around the farm buildings, as though they were protecting the occupants from the less peaceful world. This canvas is a Snow-Bound in oil: it is as characteristically New England as Whittier's classic poem. There is uplift and strength in this painting. Possibly it is the artist's training as an engineer (Editor's Note: research has revealed that RSW was not trained as an engineer) which enables him to capture the massiveness and ruggedness of the uplifted earth, but it is a pleasing forcefulness revealed in the glacial-smoothed bones of the earth; rhythmic structures that contrast with the angularity of the rambling farmhouse. One seeing New England Drama feels that he would like to return to the chore-life of the country, to split wood in the backyard, and to feel the frost bite his face."




Click Here for a Provenance New England Drama.