RSW's Diary Comments

A screen capture from Google Earth showing the bend
in the river today. The view is now blocked by I-91 and trees.

"Painted in summer 1941. Painted in the studio from a chalk drawing of the same scene before the drawing went to Northfield Seminary as a gift from the class of 1891. The original drawing was made from the back yard (overlooking the Connecticut River) of Bertha Davenport's Red Farm House, on the Brattleboro-Bellows Falls Road above Putney, Vermont. Sold July, 1945, to a private owner."

Editor's Note:

This is obviously a November scene made in the summer from a pastel (RSW called them chalks, others called them crayons... today it is correct to call them pastel). As it can be seen from the screen capture to the right, the area is a rich and fertile farmland.

We also point out the road where Woodward says he made the pastel. It makes sense it is, U.S. Route 5, it the north-south road running from New Haven, CT, to St. Johnsbury, VT. Also seen in the screen capture is Interstate 91, but I91 was not fully completed in Vermont until the 1980s so it would not appear in the painting. If it was there it would have obstructed the view.

The name and price on the back of the stretcher
We are very grateful to the owners of this canvas
for giving us access to it to takes the pictures.

This is the only known painting Woodward did of the Connecticut River. This portion of the river acts as a natural border between Vermont and New Hampshire. There was a mention in a newspaper article about Woodward painting the "oxbow" of the Connecticut River from North Hadley but we do not have a name! The clip is from the "gossip" column in the local section of the daily paper, so we can't even make a page for it because: (1) we do not know if he ever finished, and (2) if he did, it is possible that he did not like it and destroyed the canvas.

The "Oxbow" near North Hadley, MA
Enlarge the pic to see all the spots to paint

Woodward did not paint a lot of rivers. Most of his water-themed canvases are of "pooling" water in winter, or ponds, or small, wooded, interior brooks. The Deerfield River is the obvious exception. However, we still need to caution you that a third of those Deerfield River paintings are of the Charlemont Bridge over the Deerfield River before it was wiped out by the devastating category 3, hurricane of 1938. Yet, we must stress that those paintings were ALL made after the disaster from a single canvas he made a decade earlier.

We hope that someday the mystery-painting of the Oxbow near North Hadley, MA, gets discovered. Look at the map to the right... If you enlarge the image you will see S.R. 47 cutting right through the area, but there are also a couple of side roads, especially the one at the foot of that large hill and on the other side of that lake. If he were up high enough, that would be an amazing scene!

See the Brooks, Ponds, & Rivers Gallery for more water-related scenes. To check out Woodward's best Deerfield River canvases we suggest seeing, Across the Winter River featuring Purinton Hill from Charlemont, or Silent River, the Deerfield somewhere near Monroe, MA, where the hills start to get steeper.