[IMAGE, Top of page]: Winter Window, oil.
[ The correct name is FrostOnTheWindow. "Winter Window", oil, is of the Southwick studio's "cleaning room" window which was part of the carrage house next to the studio and not the Heath Studio. ]

"Winter, the most difficult of all moods of Nature, depends for its interpretation on both temperament and technique to a greater degree than any other." However difficult winter may be to capture on canvas, Robert Strong Woodward saw the stark trees against sun-glistened snow as a delightful challenge. The result was a series of winter paintings of outstanding beauty. Critics of praised him especially for his success in catching the color and vigor of the winter months.

Woodward's still life and window scenes were popular from the time he started painting them in his mid-thirties. By then his style was well developed. His attention to small detail in the foreground against a country seen beyond the window attracted many nostalgic urban buyers, for once the paintings were hung in an apartment one can look "outside" and feel New England. The shape and hand blown texture of every glass and bottle, a pot of scarlet geraniums, the page an open book, the sunlight on a window sill, give the warm feeling of a place well loved. Through the protection of the old New England glass, the falling snow, blue icicles, lonely footprints and snow laden trees of the outside world increase the sense of warmth and shelter within. These paintings became so popular that it was common for him to have several orders waiting while he was working on another.

Woodward was meticulous about the arrangement of things in his studio. However, if the petal fell from one of the geraniums, as in "Apple Tree Window", it found its place in the painting where it lay on the table. The old blown glass of each windowpane was an integral part of this type of painting. In rebuilding his studios he insisted that "... we must be patient and we shall eventually find old glass."

The only medium besides oil in which Woodward worked with any frequency was chalk. "On the Waterfront" is one of these rare subjects. In some of his earliest chalks, dampness later produced a green mold and because of this, parts of some chalks, as "In Old Boston", were erased and done over again. This explains their occasional roughness. He learned that he must store the chalks in a dry spot. The artist often made a chalk and an oil of a certain scene, but never systematically did one before the other.

The full scope of Robert Strong Woodward's paint-