Richard Caton Woodville Sr.

British, 1825–1855

Scene in a Bar-Room, 1845

scene in a bar-room by richard caton woodville sr.

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Medium: Oil on panel
Size: 8.5 x 6.75 in. (21.6 x 17.1 cm.)
Markings: Signed and dated lower right: R C W / 1845
Inscribed on reverse: Woodville / Van Allen / #6 / 120722.1; sketch of woman's head on verso

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Godel & Co. Fine Art

Bedford

About this Artwork

Size Notes: Framed dimensions: 16 ¼ x 15 in.
Provenance: The artist; Abraham M. Cozzens, New York, by April 1845; Van Allen, from 1868; Kennedy Galleries, New York, by 1982; private collection; Alexander Gallery, New York; Godel & Co., New York; Berry-Hill Galleries, New York; private collection, until 2006
Exhibitions: National Academy of Design, New York, Twentieth Annual Exhibition, 1845, no. 361; Samuel P. Avery’s, New York, 1867; Clinton Hall Art Gallery, Leavitt, Stebeigh & Company, New York, 1868; Walters Art Museum, Baltimore, Maryland (March 20-June 2, 2013) and The Mint Museum, Charlotte North Carolina (June 30-November 3, 2013), New Eyes on America: The Genius of Richard Caton Woodville (cat. no. 2, 87, illustrated).
Literature: “Sketchings. Our Private Collections, No. III,” The Crayon 3 (April 1856): 123 (as The Tough Story); Henry T. Tuckerman, Book of the Artists: American Artist Life Comprising Biographical and Critical Sketches of American Artists (1867; reprint, New York: James F. Carr, 1967), 408, 410 (as Bar-Room Interior); “Fine Arts. Richard Caton Woodville,” New-York Daily Tribune, January 22, 1867, 2; Catalogue of the Entire Collection of Paintings Belonging to the Late Mr. A. M. Cozzens (New York: Leavitt, Strebeigh & Company, 1868): no. 5 (as The Smokers [Bar-Room Interior]); “Clinton Gallery and Art,” The Evening Post [New York], May 16, 1868, 2; Copy of a letter from William Woodville V to William Pennington, June 13, 1879, Pennington Papers MS, Maryland Historical Society; Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., Charles Rufas Morey, William James Henderson, The American Spirit in Art (New Haven, 1927), 37; Frederic F. Sherman, Early American Painting (New York and London: The Century Co., 1932), 272; Mary Bartlett Cowdrey, “Richard Caton Woodville, An American Genre Painter,” American Collector 13 (April 1944): 7; Eliot Clark, History of the National Academy of Design (New York: Columbia University Press, 1954), 54-55; Elizabeth H. Payne, “America at Leisure in the 1840s,” Bulletin of the Detroit Institute of Art 35 (1955-1956), 13; James Thomas Flexner, That Wilder Image (Boston: Little, Brown, & Company, 1962), 139; Francis S. Grubar, “Richard Caton Woodville’s Waiting for the Stage,” The Corcoran Bulletin 13 (October 1963): 12; Francis Stanley Grubar, “Richard Caton Woodville: An American Artist, 1825 to 1855,”
Ph.D. dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1966, 27-30, 32, 220-222; Francis S. Grubar, “Richard Caton Woodville 1825-1855,” essay in Richard Caton Woodville: an early American Genre Painter (Washington, D.C.: The Corcoran Gallery of Art, 1967); Henry Nichols Blake Clark, “The Impact of Seventeenth-Century Dutch and Flemish Genre Painting on American Genre Painting, 1800-1865,” University of Delaware, 1982, 234-235, 381, fig. 119; Gerald Carr, entry on The Card Players, in American Paintings in the Detroit Institute of Arts (Detroit: Detroit Institute of Arts, 1997), 2:254; Justin Wolff, “Soldiers, Sharps, and Shells: Richard Caton Woodville and Antebellum Genre Painting,” Ph.D. dissertation, Princeton University, 1999, 133-135, 138-141, 151, 168, 364 (illustrated); Bruce Weber, American Paintings IX (New York: Berry-Hill Galleries, Inc., 2001) 12-13 (illustrated); Justin Wolff, Richard Caton Woodville: American Painter, Artful Dodger (Princeton, N.J. and Oxford, England: Princeton University Press, 2002), 16, 18, 19-22, 50, 77, 177n. 9, 195, fig. 1 (as Two Figures at a Stove).

Description

Richard Caton Woodville is ranked among the most prominent names in American genre painting. Due to his untimely death at the age of thirty, Woodville produced a small but impressive body of work that shows him to be a talented observer of antebellum society and politics. Woodville was born in Baltimore, Maryland, to a family of wealth and privilege. He began taking drawing lessons at St. Mary’s College during the 1830s and later enrolled in the University of Maryland medical school. After one year he left school to follow his passion to become an artist.

Scene in a Bar-Room is Woodville’s first painting of note. In his detailed study of Woodville, Justin Wolff wrote that Scene in a Bar-Room is loosely inspired by William Sidney Mount’s The Long Story, 1837 (Corcoran Gallery of Art), which Woodville likely saw firsthand in the collection of the Baltimore aesthete Robert Gilmor, Jr. Woodville and other aspiring artists were permitted access to Gilmor’s collection, which included American paintings by the likes of Mount and Thomas Cole, as well as European works by Dutch, Flemish, and English genre artists such as Jan Brueghel, David Teniers the Younger, and Sir David Wilkie. These masterpieces undoubtedly influenced Woodville’s choice of subject and style.

Painted in the spirit of Teniers, Scene in a Bar-Room is a small, unassuming composition that shows two ruddy-nosed men seated in a bar as they warm themselves by a stove. The men seem to be regulars at the bar; they both appear weary, despondent, and isolated from each other and their dingy surroundings, which include a chair with a broken back and a scattering of earthenware jugs. The man on the right gazes out at the viewer as he takes a drag on his pipe and wisps of smoke emerge from his mouth. His companion, who dons a poorly patched overcoat, stretches his hands out over the heated stovetop.

Although Scene in a Bar-Room is of humble size and subject, the painting is nonetheless one of particular importance in Woodville’s brief career. It was the first painting he exhibited at the National Academy of Design in New York in 1845, and was purchased by Abraham M. Cozzens, a prominent collector and member of the executive committee of the American Art-Union. More than twenty years after it was painted, Henry Tuckerman mentioned the painting’s significance in his Book of the Artists:

[Woodville] was first known to the American public as a painter, by a little picture of very humble pretensions as regards subject, but bearing indications of decided executive ability. It was the interior of a bar-room with two vulgar habitués seated therein…The immediate sale, however, of his first attempt seemed to justify the vocation…Woodville soon went to Germany, and studied at Düsseldorf…

While in Europe Woodville continued to paint genre scenes, and his work evolved to include more complex narrative scenes with highly detailed still-life elements, as in Old ’76 and Young ’48, 1849 (Walters Art Museum). Woodville sent many of his paintings back to America for sale and exhibition at the American Art-Union, such as Card Players, 1846 (Detroit Institute of Arts), and War News from Mexico, 1848 (Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art). In 1850 Woodville lived in Paris and London where he continued to create genre scenes of American subjects, such as Waiting for the Stage, 1851 (Corcoran Gallery of Art), and The Sailor’s Wedding, 1852 (Walters Art Museum). Woodville died in London in 1855, due to an accidental overdose of laudanum.

Woodville exhibited at the American Art-Union, which produced engravings of his paintings. He also showed his work at the National Academy of Design, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and the Royal Academy, London. Most of the approximately twelve known works by Woodville are in museum collections, including the New-York Historical Society and National Academy of Design, New York; Corcoran Gallery of Art and Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, D. C.; Walters Art Museum and Maryland Historical Society, Baltimore; Detroit Institute of Arts, and the Amon Carter Museum, Fort Worth, Texas.

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About this Artwork

Description

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