RSW's Diary Comments

Mount Aeolus in East Dorset, VT
Picture courtesy of Wikipedia

Woodward did not keep specific records of his pastels he called chalk drawings.

Editor's Note:

We believe this pastel is of Mount Aeolus (the Greek name for the God of the Winds) in East Dorset, Vermont. It is a subject Woodward drew several times. What makes us certain of this was a picture we found on Wikipedia similar the the artwork. The cut in the hill just before the peak appears in both images.

An ariel picture of Mount Dorset, VT. You can
see from this image the "Y" where Route 4 splits to
start Route 7 that leads to East Dorest. If you en-
large the picture, we provided graphics to help.

We placed a "circa" symbol in front of the year for this painting because we believe that it most likely first hung at the 1936 Southern Vermont Artist Association exhibition. That is the only year AFTER Woodward's 1934 Hiram Woodward Place fire we are missing. Another reason we believe this is because this is exactly the Vermont specific subject the artist would make specifically for the New Yorkers that summered in Vermont and patronized the annual exhibit which was held Labor Day weekend, the official end of summer, sentimentalizing the scene even more.

However, lining up the dates of when the 1936 SVAA exhibit occurred (September of 1936) and the date of the Lawrence Art Museum show (August of 1937), we have another quandary... that would indicate this pastel might have been made in October of 1935.