Richard Caton Woodville
Richard Caton Woodville
1825 - 1855
Painter. Although he grew up in Baltimore and is known for his American genre paintings, he created most of his work abroad. He relied during his schooling on engravings and art books, possibly studying with the Baltimore artist Alfred Jacob Miller and copying works in the Baltimore collection of Robert Gilmor, which was strong in Dutch and Flemish paintings, and had at least two genre works by William Sidney Mount. By 1842, when Woodville enrolled briefly at medical school, he was working as a portrait painter, although he soon turned his efforts to genre scenes. He exhibited Scene in a Bar-room (untraced) at the National Academy of Design, New York, in 1845 and the same year went to Düsseldorf, where he studied with Carl Ferdinand Sohn. Absorbing to stunning advantage the careful draughtsmanship, use of local colour, complex figural groupings, and precise finish of the Düsseldorf school, Woodville produced a small but accomplished group of genre paintings that comprise his life work.
Some of these paintings transposed traditional genre motifs into American settings. For instance, in 1851 he created the painting Sailor’s Wedding (Baltimore, MD, Walters A. Mus.), in which a colourful wedding party crowds the chambers of a magistrate. In addition to the careful attention given to the furnishings, he included such character types as the cocksure sailor and demure bride, tipsy-looking father and commandeering mother of the bride. Two paintings incorporate card-playing in an American tavern setting: the Card Players (1846; Detroit, MI, A. Inst.) and Waiting for the Stage (1851; Washington, DC, Corcoran Gal. A.). However, he also painted period costume pieces such as the Cavalier’s Return (1847; New York, NY Hist. Soc.).
Several of Woodville’s paintings focus on American politics, a topic that interested the artist during at least two visits home. The best-known of these works, during his lifetime as well as today, is News of the Mexican War (1848; New York, N. Acad. Des.), which was exhibited at the American Art Union in 1849 and distributed as a folio engraving by Alfred Jones (1819–1900) in 1851 to 14,000 subscribers. One reason for the painting’s popularity is that it captures the unpopularity of the war and the cynical assessment that it was fought primarily for the fortunes to be made in land speculation and slavery. Another work on a political theme is Politics in the Oyster House (1848; Baltimore, MD, Walters A. Mus.), in which two American men, one considerably older than the other, discuss politics. The younger man leans forward, newspaper in hand, arguing with conviction; but his companion looks out of the space with a bored expression.
Woodville’s works, which he submitted regularly to the American Art Union from 1847, were received in America with high enthusiasm. His sensitivity to American self-definition, his solid grasp of anecdote, and his clear light and colour earned him wide praise. The Baltimore collector William T. Walters bought a number of his paintings after his death, and the Walters Art Museum is today the major repository. Woodville died accidentally of an overdose of morphine, taken medicinally, in London. [Elizabeth Johns and Paul Usherwood. "Woodville." Grove Art Online. Oxford Art Online. Oxford University Press, accessed September 15, 2014, http://www.oxfordartonline.com/subscriber/article/grove/art/T092213pg1.]
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