RSW's Diary Comments

• Woodward did not keep records of the pastels he called "chalk drawings."

Unnnamed: Little Sugar House, year unknown,
reveals to us the vantage point from where
Woodward placed himself to make this chalk.

Editor's Note:

The painting seen to the right appears in the ⮞ painting above. You see the edge of it in the far right hand side of the painting. This means that the house behind the sugar house is where Woodward positioned himself to make his three "Road to Church" paintings giving us a nice perspective.

Our photo blow of the scene as it appears today does not quite hit the mark because we did not want to walk on private property without permission. From this perspective, Woodward would have had to have been parked somewhere on the property to not have the trees that line the road interfering or blocking his view. Click on the picture to the right to see our illustration and scroll down to see the scene as it appears today.

The road today with the Mary Lyon Church at
its end. The road is Charlemont Rd. looking east
with Putt's Hill in the distance as a backdrop. If
you notice, there is now a tree blocking the right
side of the scene and the barn is no longer there.

• This chalk drawing was made up the hill of Charlemont road near the Buckland Center showing the Mary Lyon Church at the end of the road. It was a serendipitous finding in the research for this website. There is no record of this chalk in the RSW diary or in any of the exhibition notices. Both the sugar house in the right foreground and the barn ell behind it are now gone.

• The picture to the left shows the road today. As you can see, many of the trees that comprise the featured beauty of the composition did not survive time and are now gone.

★ See also Church in October (A chalk) and October in Buckland (An oil painting).