LAURA WOODWARD | HOME IN THE WILDERNESS

Private Collection, New York

Acquired from the above by the present owner

Hawthorne Fine Art, New York, Soaring Sights: Luminist Landscapes by Female Hudson River School Painters (1825-1875), February - April 2017, no. 16, pp. 28, 29, 31, illustrated in color 

Laura Woodward, a New Jersey native, once shared a New York studio building with the Hart siblings, as well as pioneering female painters such as Eliza Pratt Greatorex, Sara Bascom Gilbert and Hannah Jane Blauvelt. While Woodward would ultimately become well-known for her mid- to late-career en plein air paintings of the undeveloped Florida wilderness, her success in doing so was predicated on the reputation she forged among the ranks of the male-dominated Hudson River School during the 1870s and 1880s.

Painted in 1877, while she was still living in New York City, Woodward’s Home in the Wilderness is an example of her early work. Most likely painted in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, the rustic cottage at the composition’s center implies a sentimental narrative about the bucolic simplicity of frontier life. Woodward’s fine attention to detail in the rendering of wood and foliage is indicative of her typical fresh air studies, and is an exercise in the representation of nature’s sensory abundance.