Featured Artwork: Sap's Boiling

The 1926 Lyman-Longfellow House Exhibit Card

One of eight paintings that exhibited at the Lyman-Longfellow House exhibition in December of 1926 without any diary entry in Woodward's Painting Diary.

Editor's Note:

Perhaps it is not fair to say this painting was overlooked by Woodward, as we indicate in our noteworthy portion under the Quick Reference section, but we have been concentrating on making sense of the omissions to the Painting Diary. The first obstacle is that he did not start the diary until the early 1940s and he probably, like many of us would, initially started from memory. Working on what you remember first makes sense, then filling out the rest from your records and scrapbooks later. It appears he never got to the second step. The clipping we use below comes straight from his personal scrapbook and while most of his early exhibit programs were destroyed in his 1934 Hiram Woodward studio three of his program cards from the 1926 Lyman-Longfellow House exhibition survived and we have them in our collection (right).

Boston Globe, December 23, 1926

To the Right: Boston Globe, 1926 by A. J. Philpott

"Sap's Boiling" is a fine bit of painting---the shack, the woods, the stream---a typical New England picture."

Given the description, we suspect this painting may be the exterior version of the Gray sugar that led to the rare interior paintings see to the lower right. There is a stream by the Gray sugar house, yet still, the time period does not line up unless he made the exterior before deciding to make the interior chalk (below) and accompanying oil, The Sugar House (1928).

Instead we offer you the Steaming Sugar House, c. 1928, which we believe fits, at the very least, a similar subject, if not the correct sugar house. There is another sugar house Woodward is painting at the time and that is the "Roscoe Temple" sugar house and orchard. We have no pictures of those paintings.

Steaming Sugar House, c. 1928

In the Sugar House; Boiling, c. 1930