Featured Artwork: Red Barn

The Little Red Barn, c. 1931<
This little red barn on the Keach farm is RSW's most
painted subject, yet this is the only time it is featured!
in the 60 or so canvases it appears, it is as a backdrop.

Painting diary entries for canvases made prior to 1925 are very rare. Woodward did not begin compile the diary until the 1940s and he did so primarily from memory.

Editor's Note:

There is no saying what barn this is. From the description given below by art critic Ernest Bagg, we are sure it is neither Keach Brother's barns. The earliest known barn painting is The Golden Barn (1918) just over the Buckland line in Colrain, so it is not that one. Still, the earliest known Keach farm painting is the same age, and it is a winter scene... but we have never seen the farmyard next to the 'little red barn" with cows, and that barn was actually used to store hay seen in the seven or so paintings he made of its interior. ( See New Hay )

The Springfield Union, May 15, 1922

The Springfield Union, May 15, 1922, by Ernest Newton Bagg

"A vein of quaint realism of a different sort is discovered in his Red Barn picture, the building standing out against a background of bare trees and a cold sky while cattle wait in the snow inside the typical barnyard, a bit of singularly weather-beaten picturesqueness ..."

RSW made both a chalk drawing and an oil on canvas titled Red Barn. We have not yet discovered an image for either. However, from Mr. Bagg's description above, we are pretty sure it is neither Herbert nor Harrison Keach's barns. We have also eliminated the Stetson Barn in Hawley, MA, and the Stetson farm on Ashfield Stage Road, in Buckland. Actually, every buiding on that farm is red except for the large barn with the cattle. Not that there isn't a hundred or more other choices in the area, but it is also NOT, any of the Wilder barns, or the Goddard's barns which are red in 1930 but not in 1918 and the one barn that is red pre-1922 is not a cow barn.