The following is an article which appeared in the Palm Beach Post based on an interview between Gary Schwan and Deborah C. Pollack:
A Palm Beach Art Mystery
WHY HAS THE ISLAND'S FIRST PROFESSIONAL PAINTER BEEN FORGOTTEN?
Palm Beach Post, The (FL)
August 19, 2007
By Gary Schwan
Deborah Pollack is “desperately seeking Laura.” In a sense, the search began in 1995 when the Palm Beach art dealer (and author) visited a New York antiques fair and spied a painting signed, “L. Woodward.”
"It was a delicate depiction of dense vegetation and palm trees," she recalled. "I didn't know anything about an L. Woodward, but I thought the watercolor was such good quality."
So she bought it, never imagining that a dozen years later, she would be writing a book about the artist -- a 19th-century painter named Laura Woodward, who, ironically enough, lived right in Pollack's back yard.
Woodward was a talented landscape painter, with a feathery touch typical of the so-called Hudson River School. She was admired for her "afterglows" featuring the sea and sky at sunset. But she's little known today, even in Palm Beach, where she lived from 1893 until her death in 1926.
Pollack says this is unfair. "Laura Woodward was Florida's most important woman artist of the 19th century, no question about it," she said.
"It was a treasure for Florida to have her promoting the state by exhibiting her paintings all over the country," Pollack added. "And she wasn't afraid to travel to the more exotic places," an adventure rarely attempted by the era's corset-encumbered female artists.
Woodward recorded such mosquito infested locales as the Tomoka River near Palatka, and the Ocklawaha River not far from Ocala. Closer to home, she painted around the Indian and St. Lucie rivers, as well as the Jupiter Narrows, and Fort Dallas at Biscayne Bay in present-day Miami. She was one of the first professional female artists to paint The Everglades, Pollack said.
A friend of railroad mogul and art patron Henry Flager, Woodward also depicted his resort towns of St. Augustine and Palm Beach, including The Sticks-- a local camp for African-American workers building Flagler's Florida East Coast Railroad.
In Palm Beach, then still known as Lake Worth, she became popular for her depiction of royal poinciana trees, as well as the actual lake -- a k a the Intracoastal Waterway today.
Flagler collected her work, and eight paintings are at the Henry Morrison Flagler Museum in Palm Beach.
"Henry Flagler believed in supporting regional artists," said the museum's chief curator Tracy Kamerer, adding that a Woodward painting hung in Flagler's home in St. Augustine.
"Unfortunately, the museum has no records of correspondence between them."
There are other gaps in what we know about the artist.
"The details of her life up to 1872 are very sparse, so I have to be an art detective and put the pieces together," said Pollack. The Woodward book will be published in collaboration with the Historical Society of Palm Beach County.
Posed for a drawing
It took some digging just to get an idea of what Woodward looked like. Pollack scoured the diaries of an artist named James D. Smillie on microfilm in the Archives of American Art in New York. She knew that Smillie and Woodward were friends in the city. "They shared the same studio building, and she brought him lunch all the time," Pollack said.
In 1874, he wrote that "Miss Woodward" posed for a drawing called Idle Hours. It was going to be published in the art magazine Aldine Journal. After much searching, she found a reproduction of the picture -- a young couple relaxing on a riverbank, staring dreamily at each other.
"I blew up the section with her face, and there were shadows I had to get rid of, but there she was -- a lovely young woman in her thirties. It had to be Laura,"
Still, who was this Laura, described by everyone as modest, polite, affable -- and yet quietly assertive? "She must have been assertive because there were many challenges in the way of women artists when she first started painting," Pollack said.
Woodward was born in 1834 in the upstate New York town of Mount Hope, near Middletown, the daughter of one of the founding families. In an 1860 census, the 26-year-old was living at home, her status listed as "domestic," meaning she helped around the house.
But she also appears to have taught art in the area. Perhaps she taught herself the rudiments of painting, because refined young women were encouraged to make art, but not to make a profession of it. A popular publication of the day called Godey's Lady's Book offered art instructions.
Apparently, Woodward wasn't cut out for the 19th century's "cult of domesticity," for she was studying art formally in Brooklyn after the Civil War. The catalog for an 1866 exhibition at the Brooklyn Art Association lists two paintings called Autumn Leaves and A Leaf by an artist who signed the works "L.W."
Pollack is pretty sure they were Woodward's pictures. "Women didn't want to reveal their gender by signing their full names," fearing they might be condescended to by critics, she said.
"L.W." doesn't appear again until 1872.
"I don't think she felt ready to show her work," Pollack said. "It was during this period that she was studying." As she grew more confident, however, Woodward would sign her name "L. Woodward," and eventually "Laura Woodward" by the 1890s.
Studied in Brooklyn
At the Brooklyn Academy of Design, she may have been one of 11 female students. She probably studied with William Hart and others who comprised the second-generation of Hudson River School artists, Pollack said.
These painters advocated sketching in the presence of nature, which many viewed as a reflection of The Divine. The scenes tended to be "picturesque," and capturing a mood eventually became at least as important as accurately depicting a place. Woodward's work was almost exclusively devoted to landscapes.
"People don't understand how broad the school was," said Judith Hansen O'Toole, director of the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, in Greensburg, Pa., and an expert on the Hudson River School. "It didn't only involve painters in the Hudson River Valley or New England, but Palm Beach and even California. What happened was the big names got a lot of attention, but the second- and third-tier artists were dismissed by history.
"Female artists like Laura Woodward could stand shoulder to shoulder with their male peers," she added. "But they weren't purchased by collectors and museums, so their work disappeared into attics."
By 1872, Woodward was working in Manhattan, hanging out with fellow artists and showing her work around town, including the prestigious National Academy of Design. She painted throughout New England and the Mid-Atlantic states, and exhibited as far away as Chicago. "She was a busy traveler," Pollack noted.
In the early 1880s, Woodward began wintering in St. Augustine, where she joined a group of artists boosted by Henry Flagler, who gave them studios in his Hotel Ponce de Leon. She was friends with the great landscape painter Martin Johnson Heade, whom she first met in New York.
Woodward also began visiting Palm Beach in the off-season and eventually settled on the island in 1893. She was Palm Beach's first professional artist, Pollack said.
She lived in a cottage on South Lake Trail called Sunnyhurst. She was joined by her sister, Libbie, whose health was "delicate," Pollack said. Woodward never married.
The artist's life in Palm Beach is fairly well documented, and she gave many interviews to the local papers. "Everybody here revered her," Pollack said.
When Woodward arrived, she took a studio at Flagler's Royal Poinciana Hotel, although it was still under construction. "I told Mr. Flagler I wanted to open a studio (at the hotel)," she told a reporter. "He said that I could do it, but I should have to rough it until the hotel was completed. Indeed, we did rough it."
She exhibited her paintings at the hotel and at her home. Active in the island's fledgling society scene, she was a member of the Guild of Bethesda By The Sea, and the Fortnightly Club, one of the first arts clubs.
The Palm Beach Historical Society has a photo of a group of pioneer Palm Beachers. She isn't certain, but Pollack suspects that one of them is Woodward -- older, plumper, but with the same features found in Smillie's earlier depiction of her from New York.
(An idealized Woodward may also show up in an 1890 drawing by a noted artist of the period, the illustrator Frederick S. Church, who was a friend. The amusing work was published in Harper's magazine. It depicts a young lady at her easel in the wilds of Florida. Church appears as a well-dressed alligator holding a tennis racket. Woodward would have been a less-than-blooming 57 at the time, but the features seem to be hers.)
The artist was nearly blind by 1920 and had stopped painting. In 1926, the frail woman who once braved the Florida swamps was moved to her caregiver's cottage in St. Cloud, and died a month later at age 92.
Several hundred paintings
Woodward probably created several hundred pictures, Pollack said. But she has only been able to round up 35 for reproduction in her book. "I still need many more examples. I'm also looking for letters, diaries, photographs, oral histories, people whose grandmothers may have known her."
In 1892, The Tatler newspaper in St. Augustine declared, "Every lover of the State owes (Woodward) a debt of gratitude for familiarizing the world at large with the nature of the State and her forests, streams and plants."
Gratitude is another reason why Pollack is "desperately seeking Laura."
Index Terms: FL ART HISTORY WOMAN MISSING
Copyright (c) 2007 Palm Beach Newspapers, Inc.
Record Number: 0708190442
