Antique MD Woodward 1891 Nautical Coastal Seascape Watercolor Painting 18"

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Antique 1891 seascape watercolor painting featuring a calm ocean and coastal landscape at dusk. Signed MD Woodward 1891. Attributed to … Read more Antique 1891 seascape watercolor painting featuring a calm ocean and coastal landscape at dusk. Signed MD Woodward 1891. Attributed to Martha Dewing Woodward, 1856-1950.

Martha Dewing Woodward (known as Dewing) was the founder and president of the Blue Dome Fellowship, which thrived near Woodstock in the hamlet of Shady from 1913-1917. Woodward was born in Williamsport, Pennsylvania in 1856. She was one of the eight children of John Vanderbilt Woodward, who is said to have been a cousin of Cornelius Vanderbilt. She began to paint at the age of 11 when she executed her father’s portrait. After attending the Hattie Hall Seminary for Young Ladies in Williamsport, she served as an art professor and dean of liberal arts at the Female Institute at Lewisburg (now Bucknell University), where she taught classes in drawing, China decoration and tapestry, among other subjects. From there she moved to Baltimore, where she was head of the art department at the Womens College of Baltimore (now Goucher College) and a member of the Baltimore Watercolor Club.(1)

Between 1892 and 1903, Woodward spent eleven years off and on living in Paris. In the early 1890s she attended the Académie Julian in Paris where her teachers included Tony Robert Fleury, Jacques Blanche and Jean Francois Raffaelli. In 1894, Woodward won the Grand Prix Concours de Portrait for a likeness of an elderly woman. During her time in France she also won medals in Marseilles and Nantes, and spent time in Barbizon and Arles.


During a break from France in the mid-1890s, Woodward taught at the Ethical Culture School in New York, and in 1896 she established the Dewing Woodward School of Drawing and Painting in Provincetown, Massachusetts, which was Provincetown’s first school of painting, predating Charles Hawthorne’s Jim well-known school by four years.(2) In 1900, she published the novel Some Adventures of Two Vagabonds under the pseudonym Wealthy Ann York, her mother’s birth name. By that time she was living with the aspiring artist Laura Louise Johnson, who was also from Williamsport.

In 1905, Woodward and Johnson visited Byrdcliffe, drawn to Woodstock by their acquaintanceship with the painter and illustrator Walter Shirlaw, who was staying in the art colony at the time.(3) They had heard about the area’s pictorial surroundings, liked the place, and bought a parcel of fifteen acres of land in Shady. In 1912, after a fire burned their cabin to the ground, along with Woodward’s work, library and writings, they used the insurance money they received to build a log house on the crest of the property which was adorned with a roof made of red tiles, which they called Red Roofs. The house was described as “a spacious rambling abode snuggling against a terrace of hillside.”(4)

This was the second tragic fire that Woodward experienced. Earlier her cottage in Provincetown burned to the ground and with it her paintings, lectures and antiques. Her homes in Shady were popular meeting spots for local artists, including Birge Harrison, Henry Lee McFee, William Emile Schumacher, Alfred Hutty, Eugene Speicher, Marion Bullard, Andrew Dasburg, and Edmund and Florence Rolfe. Woodward created silverpoint portraits of Birge Harrison and the Byrdcliffe and Maverick art colony founder Hervey White, and mistakenly fancied herself as the only artist working in America in the medium of silverpoint.(5) Woodward seems to have developed a close relationship with White, whose Maverick Press published her short story “The Mass of the Shepherds of Provence.” In 1916 Woodward exhibited a now lost work titled Maverick Folk Fest at the Blue Dome Fellowship’s exhibition in New York City. White remarked that Red Roofs was "permeated with European hospitality . . . . Here, men could gather for conversation with their kindred . . . . At the long table. Miss Woodward presiding, Miss Johnson her abettor and aide. My poor experience had never known anything like it . . . ."(6)

In 1913 Woodward was given a commission that required the use of models, and had a group of female models from New York City come up to pose for her. Since they were not being used all the time, and there were many painters in and around, Woodward and Johnson asked artists in the community to come by when they were not being utilized, and draw or paint the models in the nude, in the out-of-doors or in a forest setting. The group grew to include Henry Dey and his wife Sophie Schuyler Dey, Remington Schuyler and his wife Ann, Edmund Rolfe and his wife Florence, Alfred Hutty, Katherine Merrill, and the well-known painter Jonas Lie, who had studied with Woodward at the Ethical Culture School in New York, and remained close with his former teacher. In October 1913 the group gathered around the fireplace toasting marshmallows and decided to make the event an annual fiesta. The group named Woodward life president, and named themselves after her favorite slogan, “Worship God Under the Blue Dome of Heaven.”

The Blue Dome Fellowship was established as an association of artists and students who joined together primarily for the mutual benefit of studying the problems identified with painting the nude figure in light and color under the open sky. Woodward and Johnson believed that it would be beneficial for artists to work together to help solve the difficulties that ensue when painting the figure outdoors in different surroundings, light and climates. They would place models under a light blue gauze scrim or canopy that would cast a colored reflection upon the figure, and mute or soften the bright sunlight. The fellowship had a board of directors and a group of counselors that included people prominent in the arts, among them the museum director Cornelia Bentley Sage Quinton, the American art critic and editor Leila Mechlin, and the sculptor and teacher R. Tait McKenzie. The Blue Dome Fellowship held successful annual exhibitions at the Ehrich Gallery in New York City and at the Shady studio, and grew to include numerous amateur and professional artists and students.

Dimensions:
18.25" x 1" x 12.75" / Sans Frame - 9.5" x 4" (Width x Depth x Height) See less