Dr. and Mrs. Lawrence Lunt

The sad story of the relationship between two brilliant men.

Editor's note: Dr. Lawrence Lunt was a long-time friend of Robert Strong Woodward. The letter below was written by Dr. Lunt and given to us by his family.

I came to know Rob Woodward through my precious cousin Minnie Eliot (Mrs. Amory Eliot of Boston and Manchester, Mass) who accepted me into her home as a son, my second home. Through a cousin of hers, Joseph Cowell, who was studying at the Boston Museum School of Art, she heard of his friend, Woodward, who was paralyzed from the waist down from a shooting accident at the age of 18. He had a revolver in a shoulder holster, and in stripping off his sweater cocked the gun, and it went off severing his spinal cord.

Click to read newspaper articles about the gunshot accident.

He had wanted to become a painter, and after his recovery took up making delightful individual greeting cards, Christmas cards, bookplates, illuminations of someone's favorite quotations, etc., each one a special production, and every one utterly delightful. But he could not make a living this way, and wanted to go on to his original goal of landscape painting in oil. He had never had a single lesson, and cousin Minnie felt he should come to Boston from California where he was living, and go to the Museum School. She raised the necessary money to bring him East, and as I had become interested and had developed a correspondence friendship with him, Joe Cowell and I met him at the Back Bay Station in Boston, and we took him to the small apartment which Joe had rented not far from the museum. Joe was undertaking to look after Rob, nurse, cook, housekeeper and wheel him back and forth from the school every day. It was an impossible arrangement and didn't last for more than perhaps two months. Rob got practically no instruction, in that time, but he made many friends, as no one could help but love him.

He had a family of cousins living on a farm in Shelburne Falls, Mass. and they offered to take him in, a wonderful family. One of the daughters of that town and I still keep in touch by Christmas cards. So he moved to Shelburne Falls and lived in a small house owned by and next to this cousin on a country road west of Shelburne Falls. He made a little milk house into his studio, utterly charming, as was everything he touched.

He couldnt make a living with his little greeting cards, etc. and encouraged by Minnie and other friends who pitched in to help financially, he began working in oils. After a year he had progressed sufficiently to have Gardner Symons, a well-known artist of the New England scene, tell him that he ought to jump right in and send pictures to the New York Art Museum show which had a section for new artists under 30 or 35 years of age. (Not sure of the age.) The prize was, I think $500 and was known as the Hallgarten Prize. Rob won it, to everyone's delight, and this launched him on his career. But he had to have financial help from interested friends as his manage was necessarily expensive, a nurse housekeeper and a man or boy to do the heavy work around the house and lift him in and out of bed to his wheel chair. He worked very hard, and sold quite a lot of pictures, but at only $450 apiece, with some larger ones getting more. The income was not large. He had to have a horse and buggy to drive off into the hills where he could paint - another expense. He rigged up a stand on which he could hold his canvas and make the necessary first draft of a landscape, and then finish it in his studio.

I kept in touch with him, and went up for weekends when I could. He would drive me off up into the lovely Hampshire hills, I walking, and much mutual enjoyment was derived from these excursions.

His deep and all-pervading love of his New England hills gave him an insight and feeling which he was fortunate enough to be able to put on to canvas in most beautiful and unique and faithful pictures.

There was a time when he got into a somewhat desperate mood because of his limitation and as I recall it I quoted him something from Marcus Aurelius. Perhaps: "Nature sends nothing that one cannot bear." I do not remember. In any event, it naturally made him angry and he wrote me a rather scathing letter to the effect that he doubted if I could bear what he had to put up with etc. etc. A perfectly justifiable rebuke, which interrupted our correspondence for a bit. Then along came this drawing done from a photograph of Mount Susan from the Dodge Ranch, Haystack Gulch, with the quotation from Marcus Aurelius, "Live as if you were on a mountain," and the mild interruption of our communication ceased.

He was one of the finest men I ever knew. He came to be a close friend of my wife too, after our marriage, and we visited him as often as we could. He lost his first delightful little studio with everything in it, a number of pictures, and his supplies. Then, of course, his friends jumped in and made it possible for him to buy a small house with barn, and he made it into another completely delightful and unique home and studio. After a few years this lovely place was struck by lightning and burned to the ground, but some of his paintings and furniture were saved by neighbors. He bought another small place which had a blacksmith shop attached and again created something unique and beautiful. His courage, his complete disregard of his handicap and wheelchair, and skill in maneuvering it, made one entirely unconscious of his being handicapped. Visits with him were always a joy and something to treasure.


However, as he got older, his physical disabilities became worse and he gradually sank into a depression which made him withdraw from everyone, including even his much loved cousin who continued to live in Shelburne Falls. (Perhaps his aunt did for some years, I am not sure.) He ceased wanting to see his friends and we stopped going to see him, which was very sad. However, his cousin said that he seemed to welcome letters from us, so we continued to write occasionally.

He finally died in 1957, and left a gap in our lives that no one else could ever fill.

His life could be made into a book because of his heroism, his outgivingness, his deep interest in, and capacity for friends. There is a very good article about him in the October, 1946, issue of American Artist which I have on file.
LKL

FROM WOODWARD'S PERSONAL RECORDS REGARDING THE LUNT'S PAINTINGS