✽ There is no painting diary entry for this painting that exhibited at the artist's 1926 Lyman-Longfellow Home Exhibition.
One could select any number of Quintessential Redgate paintings to
suggest the subject of this painting. The artist leaves no guessing in its name. Even within the catagory of Quintessential Redgate
paintings there are subgroups separating them: (1) dusk-time atmospheric scenes, (2) winter evening streams, and (3) the woods at
night. Here we chose Winter Night, but we could have also selected, Under the Winter
Moon, Through The Night, or Small Hemlock
in Snow.
Along with the winter evening stream paintings Woodward is painting a subject at its zenith. The stream
along side his Redgate studio pooling up as the snow and ice dams up its path, and the woods at night are painted at the moon's
peak of fullness. Both subjects share the idea of "latent potential," gathering and amassing.
This painting was mentioned
in an article on the exhibit, see below...
"There is a quiet, peaceful atmosphere in The Woods at Night."
What is most interesting about this article that deviates from the other articles about this exhibit is the reporter seemed to most appreciate Woodward's dark Redgate paintings, making remarks on all of the ones shown and just making glancing mentions of the other paintings. If we were to guess, the writer is older and prefers the tonalism made popular by Whistler and Blakelock of the prior generation. This would be Woodward's last exhibit that would feature this larger a group of these types of paintings.