Wilbur Winfield Woodward

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Wilbur Winfield Woodward, born St. Omer, Decatur County, Indiana, 1851, died Lawrenceburg, Indiana, 1882, was an American painter.

Wilbur Winfield Woodward, Springtime, Indianapolis Museum of Art

Woodward trained at the McMicken School of Design, Cincinnati, before moving to Europe where he studied at Royal Academy of Fine Arts Antwerp, and then at the Académie Julien in Paris under Tony Robert-Fleury. He then returned to Cincinnati for a year as a teacher at the McMicken School of Design, before returning to Paris where he set up a studio. In 1879 he exhibited Une cour de vieux Paris (A courtyard in old Paris) at the Salon.[1], and in 1880 an Ossian, subtitled, Ossian, vieux et aveugle, restait avec la veuve de son fils, seul survivant d’une race royale et héroïque (Ossian, old and blind, left with the widow of his son, only survivor of a royal and heroic race), 67 x 116 cm.[2] In both the 1879 and 1880 Salon catalogues Woodward is recorded living at 22, Rue Monsieur-le-Prince, located between the Odéon and the Sorbonne. No. 22 is a famous old building where other artists had studios and as it has an open courtyard this possibly served for Woodward’s 1879 Salon painting. Although the Ossian is untraced, the composition is known through a contemporary press wood-engraving for which Woodward provided the drawing, as well as drawing - possibly Woodward’s ricordo of the painting - in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. In Paris, in addition to painting, Woodward also worked a designer for French illustrated journals, and according to Hicok Low it was on commission from one of these to record the Yorktown Centennial Celebration[3] in October 1881 that he returned and unfortunately died back in Indiana in 1882, at the young age of 31.

Smith in his The History of the state of Indiana of 1903 writes that ‘Wilbur Woodward, of Greenberg, gave promise of becoming one of the greatest painters in the world’,[4] which is not as far-fetched as it seems, Woodward’s Springtime, donated by the artist’s father, in the Indianapolis Museum of Art is the equal of the best French painters of the period. As Woodward died so young his works are rare, and in addition to Springtime, A Girl removing flees from a dog, which is signed and date 1879, was sold in Metz in 2019, and two drawings by him, the Ossian, previously mentioned, and a Summer Evening (another ricordo drawing), are in the collection of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Nonetheless as Burnet in 1921 mentions that Woodward had been collected by leading collectors in Cincinnati and New York,[5] more of his work is probably to be discovered both in the United States and in France.

Hicok Low paints a vivid picture of Woodward in Paris describing him as one of the ‘types of the quarter’ who would be seen wearing a sombrero, shoulder length hair, thigh length cavalry boots, and playing his banjo where ‘memories of the Ohio would resound around the walls of this Paris studio’[6]

Works[]

  • Springtime. Oil on canvas, 99 x 84 cm. Indianapolis, Indianapolis Museum of Art oil on canvas.
  • Girl removing flees from a dog. 1879. Oil on panel, 23 x 15 cm.
  • Ossian. Graphite on cream bristol board, 18.6 x 28.3 cm. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
  • Summer Evening. Graphite on cream colored paper, 18.7 x 23.5 cm. Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts.
Wilbur Woodward, Ossian. Salon 1880. Jamie Mulherron

Bibliography[]

  • Will Hicok Low, A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873-1900, New York, 1908, p. 65.
  • Mary Q. Burnet, Art and Artists of Indiana, New York 1921, pp. 55-57.

References[]

  1. ^ Salon 1879, no. 1879, p. 252
  2. ^ Salon 1880, no. 1880, p. 386
  3. ^ Will Hicok Low, A Chronicle of Friendships, 1873-1900, New York, 1908, p. 65.
  4. ^ William Henry Smith, The history of the state of Indiana from the earliest explorations by the French to the present time. Containing an account of the principal civil, political and military events from 1763 to 1903, Indianapolis 1903, p. 510.
  5. ^ Mary Q. Burnet, Art and Artists of Indiana, New York 1921, p. 57.
  6. ^ Hicok Low, op. cit., p. 65

External links[]

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