Robert William Wood

Robert Wood and Florence "Kitty" Wood on the Scenic Loop, Near San Antonio

Biography

by Jeffrey Morseburg

Throughout his long career, Robert W. Wood had his finger on the pulse of American landscape painting. For more than thirty years he was America’s best-loved and most widely known landscape artist. Publishers reproduced well over a hundred of Wood’s works, and millions of these prints were sold throughout the United States, Canada and abroad. His publishers claimed that he was the world’s most widely reproduced landscape artist. A dedicated and prolific painter who spent countless hours in the field under the hot sun and long evenings in the studio, during his sixty year career Wood may have painted more different American landscape subjects than any other artist.

Robert William Wood was born on March 4, 1889 in Sandgate, in the County of Kent, in southeast England. He was the third of eight children, but the first child to escape the high mortality of a Victorian childhood. His father, John William Wood Jr. (1857-1930), was a painter and decorator and his mother, Annie Amelia Hopkins (1861-1921), was a housewife. Annie Hopkins was originally from Middlesex and she and John Wood met in Sandgate, where she may have come to work in a hotel or as a shop girl. Robert Wood had three younger sisters, Dorthy, Helda and Ada, and two younger brothers, Frank and Albert. Of the six Wood siblings that survived childhood, four of them were destined to follow Robert to America, with only Dorthy and Ada remaining in England.

Early Years in England

Sandgate would have been a healthy and interesting place to grow up. It is a small village located just west of the famous White Cliffs of Dover, between the larger towns of Folkstone on the East and Hythe to the West. Early in the 19th century a small harbor was constructed in Folkstone, where channel packets departed for the continent. After the South Eastern Railway line reached Folkstone in 1843, the area drew investment and became popular with tourists and businessmen waiting to depart for Europe and with vacationers in the summer. Wood spent some of his early years living inland, with his grandparents, closer to the small Folkstone harbor, and later the family lived above a shop on the High Street, which overlooked the English Channel. As he watched the travelers come and go from France and the ships traveling south around the coast on their way to America, his curiosity about the world was piqued and the wanderlust that became part of his character was born.

Wood’s father had a shop in Sandgate working for home and hotel owners doing the elaborate architectural painting and finishes that were popular in the Victorian Age. Unfortunately, John Wood was an alcoholic and his drinking would be a source of tension between him and his wife throughout his children’s childhood. He seems to have made a hobby of drawing and painting, but his prowess in art has probably been exaggerated in family lore. Contrary to some early accounts, he was not a recognized Victorian painter. In any event, he had a pencil in his son’s hands at a young age and the family encouraged Robert Wood’s early artistic efforts. The channel coast made an idea subject, for it could be sunny and calm when the weather was good, but when the wind was blowing and the sea was high, the waves would lash the seashore with all the fury that nature could bring to the task. Wood’s early drawings and paintings were accordingly of the sea, the coast and the ships that plied the English Channel.

Wood was an industrious boy and helped his family by assisting his father on decorating jobs and shining the shoes of the travelers who visited Folkstone. He did well in his studies, but left school early to pursue his interest in art. He took art classes in nearby Folkstone and as a young man won a number of awards for his drawings and paintings. While his family was justifiably proud of his artistic achievements, there was not an art school in Folkstone that would have been able to give him the type of classical academic instruction that was typical at the turn of the century, so when he was in his teens he ventured to London. In the British capital he took classes in South Kensington, where the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Royal College of Art were located.

The extent of Wood’s artistic education in England is not yet fully known, but as part of his estate collection this writer received a certificate signed by F.G. Ogilvie for a First Class award in Freehand Drawing in 1905. Ogilvie was a major British educator in the Victorian and Edwardian era and he signed awards and diplomas as an official of the South Kensington educational system, serving as the “Principal Assistant Secretary, Technology and Higher Education in Science and Art.” While Wood may have taken classes aimed at young people, some research into the classes and courses of 1905-1906 in South Kensington also reveals a series of “Short Courses of Instruction in Art,” which included an abbreviated version of the classical curriculum that one would have found at the Royal Academy of Art in London or the Ecole des Beaux Arts in Paris. Because we don’t have any evidence that Wood studied at either the Royal Academy of Art or the Royal College of Art and we know he didn’t live in London long enough to complete a proper academic education, this type of basic instruction in art would be a logical inference from the information that has come to light thus far. Furthermore, the gradual path he took to artistic maturity would seem to confirm this thesis.

Wood Emigrates to America

Wood served as a bugler in the Royal Army for two years, from about 1908-1910, but further research is necessary to establish the exact dates of his service. In any event, when he was finished he decided to emigrate to the United States with his younger friend Claude Waters (1893-1971). When he had saved the princely sum of twenty-five pounds, Wood and Waters booked passage on a steamship from Liverpool to New York. In his biographies, Wood used to date his arrival in the United States as 1910, but the availability of shipping manifests from the era now reveals the exact date as March 7, 1911, when he arrived at Ellis Island on the passenger liner S.S. Franconia. Wood’s occupation was listed as a decorator, his father’s trade upon his arrival in America. Once they arrived in New York, the two Englishmen saw the sights and then set out for Illinois, where Waters’ uncle had a farm, so Wood’s first job in America was as a farmhand near Big Rock, Illinois, a bit west of Chicago and Lake Michigan.

Although Wood was a hard worker, he wanted to see the United States and try his hand at art, so he soon left farm life and the Midwest to explore the country. He began painting small, picturesque landscapes of the American subjects he saw in order to support himself on his travels. With an ability to create an instant rapport with his viewers Wood soon became adept at trading his paintings for meals or lodging. The itinerant artist made his way across the country by hopping freight trains and when he couldn’t support himself by selling or trading his paintings, he worked as a laborer, becoming a jack-of-all-trades. Wood was warm and outgoing and made friends easily, so he seemed to always find a place to stay. By 1912 he had reached Southern California, recalling later that he first arrived in Los Angeles in April of that year, the morning that the sinking of the Titanic had made the news.

Marriage and Family

Later in 1912, we know Wood was in Louisiana because there is an early work of a moose in a landscape with that date that was traded to a man who managed the railroad station, in exchange for meals and lodging. When he visited Jacksonville, Florida, he met a young Ohio-born girl named Eyssel del Wagoner and the pair fell rapidly in love. Throughout his life, Wood was able to put his soft English accent, easy manner and natural charisma to work for him in charming the opposite sex. Robert and Eyssel were married in 1912, despite the fact that Eyssel was only fifteen. In that era, her young age was not considered unusual or an impediment to matrimony. Wood didn’t want to stay in the south, so the young couple traveled north to the Midwest. They first settled in Saint John’s, in rural Ohio, for several years, where his daughter Florence Adeline Wood (1913-1989) was born. Next, the Wood family moved to Waterman, Illinois, a small village west of Chicago, where they were based until 1917. On his World War I draft registration he amusingly listed his occupation as “ole hobo,” which probably reflected his unconventional way of making a living by cadging his paintings. Waterman was not far from Big Rock, Illinois, where Wood had first landed in the United States, so he may have re-joined his friend Claude Waters there.

In 1919, the Wood family set out for Seattle, on the west coast, where his father – who had emigrated in 1917 – and his younger siblings, Helda, Frank and Albert, had recently settled. Seattle was a much larger city than the places the Woods had been living in the Midwest, so it offered much more opportunity for an artist to make a living. Wood was a natural showman and it was probably in Seattle that he began the practice of painting in front of an audience. He painted small landscapes in downtown store windows, which would draw a crowd and help him to sell the small “buckeye” paintings he was then producing. In the Wood family archives there is a photograph from about 1920 of Robert Wood painting in a Seattle store window with his younger brother Bert looking on. Wood augmented the sale of his paintings with work in the decorating trade. His friend Claude Waters also ventured west, living with the Wood family for a time. Wood’s time in Seattle also saw the birth of a son, John Robert Wood (1919-1967).

The early works that Wood painted in the Northwest were usually small, rapidly executed paintings of the Cascade Mountains – Mt. Rainer, Mt Hood, Mt. St. Helens and the Two Sister range were all common subjects – or of the Washington or Oregon coast. Although he was capable of better, more complex paintings, most of the works were simply composed, with thin, hurried brushwork, and were frankly quite formulaic, because there was not yet a large market for fine art in the Northwest. Most of Wood’s early Northwestern paintings were painted on pressed art board rather than wooden panels or canvas and simply signed “R. Wood.” He usually used a rubber stamp to impress his name and studio address on the back of the board. These small landscapes were usually small enough for tourists to pack into their luggage. In his Northwest period, Wood favored elongated rectangular compositions, which were ideal for a depiction of the coast or a panorama of the Cascades.

The baby, John Robert Wood, was a sickly young boy, plagued by respiratory problems, and the Wood family traveled a great deal in the early 1920s, trying to find a place where his health would improve. Driving in a large touring car that was equipped with camping gear, the Wood family traveled through Washington, Oregon, California and then to the Midwest, with the family camping out while Robert painted and sold his works. His daughter, Florence, or “Kitty” as the family called her, recalled the months of travel fondly in her later years and she and her father always remained close. Wood was seeking a place to finally put down roots, but it took him a lot of time and travel to find a place where his son’s health would improve and where he could make a living with his art.

By 1922, the Woods settled for a time in Portland, on the Oregon coast. There Wood opened a small studio and hired a pair of Japanese girls as studio assistants. He kept painting smaller works on art board, but also began to do a few more ambitious landscapes on canvas in larger sizes. The first of what would eventually be hundreds of Robert Wood reproductions was probably published in Portland. Titled “Dawn,” the composition shows a beautiful young woman in classical attire greeting the day, her figure framed by a giant tree against a dramatic, rocky backdrop. Derived from the work of Maxfield Parrish, who was then at the height of his popularity, the print shows a level of mastery that was superior to the small, rapidly-produced paintings he was selling. The “Dawn” reproduction was clearly successful, as copies are still frequently found today, despite the rapid deterioration of paper prints. Wood only remained in Portland for two years, but during that time he began to find a market for his paintings. Hundreds of works from his Northwest era survive today, although many of them are in fragile condition due to the nature of the materials he painted on.

Putting Down Roots in Texas

In 1924, while crisscrossing the country once again, Wood discovered the Lone Star State of Texas. He painted in Houston, Dallas and Corpus Christi, setting up his easel in store windows and painting until a crowd gathered. Finally, he decided to settle in the historic city of San Antonio, in the center of the vast state. San Antonio was very different from the places Wood had lived in the past, with its warm climate, adobe buildings, relaxed attitude and its melding of Mexican and American cultures. San Antonio was usually sunny even in the winter months and if an artist could take the heat, he could paint out of doors throughout the year. San Antonio also boasted a very active art scene with the San Antonio Artists League, which was a strong organizing group, as well as a number of professional painters. The young leading light of the San Antonio art scene, Julian Onderdonk (1882-1922), who had been known for his scenes of Texas wildflowers, had just died two years before Wood’s arrival.

Wood quickly became part of the San Antonio art scene. He opened a studio downtown and began to make trips out to the hills that surrounded the city to paint the stunning Red Oaks as they changed color in the autumn and the profusion of wildflowers in the springtime. Ever the showman, he painted in store windows as well as between vaudeville acts in the theatre. Wood’s small works soon began to sell to the northern tourists who visited the sunny city during the winter months. In addition, when the Wood family arrived, San Antonio was in the midst of a Roaring Twenties building boom and hundreds of stately Spanish-style homes were being built, creating a market for Texas landscapes. It was in San Antonio that Wood began to paint larger, more detailed and more ambitious works, to step closer to realizing his potential as an artist.

In 1923, just before Wood came to San Antonio, the exceptional Spanish artist Jose Arpa Y Perea (1860-1952) came back to the city after a seven-year absence. Arpa was a well-traveled and worldly man who had established himself in his native Spain as well as Mexico before arriving in Texas. An academically trained painter, he had graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts in Seville, where he won the Prix de Rome scholarship, allowing him to study in the eternal city. Because of his academic background, Arpa was a versatile painter who could paint anything – portraits, large compositions drawn from history, still lifes, murals and the type of sun-filled Texas landscapes that local viewers prized. He was also a teacher who taught an academic curriculum at the San Antonio Art School as well as popular plein-air “camps” that were held each spring in the streets of San Antonio and on the ridges surrounding the city. Wood took advantage of Apra’s presence and began to study with the Spanish painter, both in the studio and out of doors. It was Arpa’s training and sophistication that helped Robert Wood reach his artistic maturity. His work became more ambitious, with a greater amount of detail, and he began to successfully capture the intense light of the Texas Hill Country.

Wood’s early years in San Antonio coincided with a number of important events in the artistic history of the city. In the fall of 1926, the Witte Museum opened with Elizabeth Onderdonk, the artist Julian Onderdonk’s younger sister, as art curator. Then there were the Texas Wildflower Competitive Exhibitions, the dream of the philanthropic oilman Edgar B. Davis (1873-1951). These competitive shows of paintings of wildflowers and Texas life were mounted in San Antonio from 1927 to 1929. Held at the newly opened Witte Museum early each spring, the exhibition featured large cash prizes, which were an inducement for artists to travel from all over the United States to paint in the Hill Country of Texas. The “Davis Competions,” as they were usually known, helped to cement San Antonio’s reputation as an art center, a position it maintains today. Jose Arpa’s works won a number of the major prizes and one of Wood’s works was juried into the 1928 exhibition, confirming that he was becoming an established San Antonio artist.

One of the other effects of the successful Davis exhibitions was that they institutionalized the blue lupin, the state flower of Texas, known colloquially as the “Texas Bluebonnet,” as the most desired subject for Texas art collectors and visitors to the Texas Hill Country. Wood soon became an excellent painter of the different varieties of the native flowers and the varied landscapes that they are found in during the spring months. He preferred to show signs of domesticity in his wildflower scenes, depicting them against haphazard, “stacked stone” walls that are found in the area, against a broken down wood fences, or dilapidated pioneer farm houses. Like the real Bluebonnets, Wood’s flowers ranged in color from a light blue to a dramatic blue-violet and some of his depictions of Texas in the springtime were truly inspired. Like most of the other successful San Antonio landscape painters, Wood sometimes tired of the tedious work of painting hundreds of the blue flowers into his landscapes, but because of the popularity of the subject, the task was unavoidable for any artist who wanted to sell works of the Hill Country. The famous Mexican-American artist Porfirio Salinas (1910-1973), who began his career as Wood’s assistant, claimed late in his life to have started his career painting Bluebonnets into Wood’s compositions.

"Spring Bluebonnets" was Painted in the 1930s.

Artistic Maturity

While Wood’s career was beginning to come together, his family life was falling apart. For a number of years, Robert and Eyssel had many having problems, apparently some of them due to the artist’s reluctance to have more than two children. In August of 1927, while the family was living on Pasadena Avenue in San Antonio, a third child, Dorthy Fay Wood, who has been previously unknown in the artist’s history, was born in San Antonio. The following year, the Woods divorced. Eyssel Wood moved back to the Midwest to be with her family, taking the Wood’s third, infant child with her, while the older children remained with Robert in San Antonio. For a time Wood and his children lived together, but within a few years, John Robert moved in with friends – the Faller family who ran the local paint store – and Florence was boarded for a time in town. John Robert Wood, known as “Buster” to the family, was a handful for the artist and he was enrolled in Peacock Military Academy, while Florence “Kitty” Wood completed her education at Los Angeles Heights High School.

In 1931, as the Great Depression settled in, Wood’s mentor Jose Arpa, who was the most respected painter in San Antonio, moved back to his native Spain. The following year, the Wood family moved out into the countryside in the hills above San Antonio, on the “Scenic Loop” near Helotes Creek, which was then a rural area that was being developed with a small number of houses. It was a hilly area with wonderful views of San Antonio, which was about seventeen miles in the distance. Wood built a large six-room stone ranch house with a studio and a carport for the automobile that took him on trips. He was at home out on the loop, because the neighbors were some distance away and the privacy allowed him to paint with few interruptions. The move was a also beneficial because Wood could go out sketching each day by simply taking a walk. The Bluebonnets that were his best-selling subject were all around the hills near his house in the springtime and the red oaks that he liked to paint could be found close by as well. Each fall, when the red oak turned color, he would go out sketching, often depicting the trees against the setting sun. Wood never lost his wanderlust and from San Antonio he would also drive north into Oklahoma or on extended sketching trips to the Southern Rockies. His friend Carl Hoppe, the San Antonio painter, would often join him in painting the wildflowers or cactus.

Wood was an industrious and prolific artist and he knew that if he relied solely on San Antonio residents for his patrons, life would be a struggle, so he began to send his paintings to dealers and galleries across the country, some of whom he met when they wintered in Texas. One of his first dealers, whom he began dealing with in the 1920s, was Harry Eichleay of Pittsburgh. Eichleay was from a successful family of Pittsburgh industrialists, and through his Harry O. Eichleay Art Company he published some of the first Robert Wood reproductions and sold Wood’s paintings to eastern collectors. By the 1930s Wood was also sending his paintings to the galleries of the Marshall Fields Department Store in Chicago. Julian Onderdonk had began selling his works through Marshall Fields before 1920 and so the trail had already been broken for Texas Bluebonnet landscapes in Chicago. The Newman Galleries in Philadelphia also began to represent Wood in the east.

During his years in San Antonio, Wood began to sign some of his works with a pseudonym, “G. Day.” Now, why exactly he began this practice isn’t clear. Usually painting under a pseudonym allows an artist to do quicker, less accomplished works while not damaging their reputation, but in Wood’s case, the relatively small number of Texas landscapes signed “G. Day” that have been discovered thus far are the equal of his works under his own name. In his case, painting under another name would allow him to avoid getting into conflicts with Texas dealers when he sold his paintings to neighbors and friends who couldn’t afford to pay the same price as tourists. A number of works signed “G. Day” were discovered back in the 1970s in the exclusive Olmos Park neighborhood of San Antonio, which was developed in the 1920s, while Wood was still living in the city itself.

Have a Robert W. Wood That Needs to Be Evaluated or Appraised:

Contact: robertwoodinfo@yahoo.com

"Live Oak" is a Brilliant 1960's Canvas by Robert Wood.