Stanley Wingate Woodward (1890-1970)

Stanley Wingate Woodward was born in Malden, Massachusetts, as one of eight children and a twin to Sidney Woodward, who later became an art dealer and critic. Stanley studied art at the Eric Pape School of Art, the School of the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. His artistic career was interrupted during World War I when he served as a Corporal in the Field Artillery in France, and for World War II when he joined in the Air Corps in Tacoma, Washington. Woodward settled in Ogunquit, Maine, and supported himself through freelance illustrations for Collier’s Magazine and Christian Science Monitor, where Sidney was an art editor. In 1919 he made his first sketching trip to Marblehead, Massachusetts, and quickly made friends with North Shore artists Aldro Hibbard, Anthony Thieme and William Lester Stevens, who introduced him to the region. Woodward became happily immersed in the nearby Rockport artists’ colony. By 1937, he established the Woodward Outdoor Painting School in Rockport, and maintained a residence and studio in town. 

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In 1923 Woodward had his first solo show of marine oils at Casson Galleries and received an enthusiastic response from collectors, selling out the entire exhibition. In 1926 Woodward married Ruth Brainerd and moved into a home in Newton, Massachusetts; it was here that he befriended his next-door-neighbor, a young Bette Davis. Davis introduced the artist and his work to a number of her friends in Hollywood, including Janis Carter, Linda Darnell, and Elanor Powell, among others. Woodward taught across the country, including at the Ringling Art School of Sarasota, Florida, the Laguna Beach School of Art and Design, as well as University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Throughout his lifetime Woodward held memberships at the Guild of Boston Artists, the Boston Society of Watercolor Painters, the Salmagundi Club, the Academic Artists Association, and exhibited frequently at the Corcoran Gallery, the Art Institute of Chicago, and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts. Many of these venues awarded him prizes for his work, including the Hallgarten Prize at the National Academy, the Hammond purchase prize at the New York Watercolor Club, and a gold medal in 1930 at Boston’s Tercentenary Exhibition. Woodward’s works are included in many collections, such as the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, the Fort Worth Museum of Art, the Wellesley Public Library, the Malden Public Library, as well as Bowdoin and Amherst Colleges.