Description:
Print (steel engraving): “Mount Holyoke from Tom’s Station.” Signed at lower right, “JDW” for John Douglas Woodward (1848-1924). From Picturesque America; or, The Land We Live In, A Delineation by Pen and Pencil of the Mountains, Rivers, Lakes...with Illustrations on Steel and Wood by Eminent American Artists. Vol. II, edited by William Cullen Bryant. D. Appleton and Company, New York, 1874. The book Picturesque America was a six-volume work on America’s natural attractions and was edited by William Cullen Bryant (1794–1878). William Cullen Bryant was an American romantic poet, journalist, and long-time editor of the New York Evening Post. Born in Cummington, Massachusetts, he started his career as a lawyer but showed an interest in poetry early in his life. He soon relocated to New York and took up work as an editor at various newspapers. The artists John Douglas Woodward was born on July 12, 1846 in Middlesex Co., Virginia, the son of John Pitt Lee Woodward and Mary Mildred Minor Woodward. The family moved while he was still very young and he spent his childhood in Covington, Kentucky, where J.P.L. Woodward became a successful hardware merchant. By 1861, he had begun studying art under the German painter T.C. Welsch in nearby Cincinnati, Ohio. The family had Confederate sympathies and fled to Canada during the American Civil War. In 1863, though, John travelled to New York City where he studied until 1865 at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. He exhibited his first painting at the Academy in 1867.Initially he tried to earn a living as a landscape artist, taking his inspiration from the countryside of Virginia. (His family had settled in Richmond after the war ended in 1865.) However, he found it impossible to earn a living from fine art alone and was drawn to book illustration. In 1871, he received his first commission from Hearth and Home magazine, which took him on a sketching tour of the South; these drawings appeared as wood engravings in the magazine. From 1872-3, he travelled extensively as one of the primary illustrators for D. Appleton & Company's series Picturesque America, whose many engravings were based on sketches or watercolor paintings done on site. Woodward's drawings and paintings illustrated the sections on "Mackinac", the "South Shore of Lake Erie",the "Valley of the Connecticut", "Boston", the "Valley of the Housatonic", the "Valley of the Genesee", the "Eastern Shore","Lake Memphremagog", "The Upper Delaware", and the "Water-falls at Cayuga Lake". His Connecticut Valley, from Mount Tom; Boston, from South Boston; and Quebec were the basis for three of its steel engravings. The work was a major influence on the growth of American tourism and on its conservation and preservation movements.
Link to share this object record:
https://museums.fivecolleges.edu/detail.php?t=objects&type=ext&id_number=HD+2023.5.2 |
