Landscape

1936

Hale Woodruff

Painter, American, 1900 - 1980

A hilly terrain with ridges, bushes, trees, and rocks outlined in dark brown and filled in with earthy tan and pecan brown, goldenrod yellow, and moss and emerald green almost fills this nearly square, stylized landscape painting. Framing the scene is a steel-gray, broken tree trunk to our left and a small grove of leafless bushes, with vertical, nearly straight branches to our right. Another grove of tightly spaced tree trunks is clustered near a smoky, plum-purple ridge at the back center, and a touch of clear blue toward the lower right corner suggests a winding stream. A narrow band of sapphire-blue sky along the top edge of the canvas is streaked with white clouds painted with long swipes of the brush. The artist signed the work in the lower left corner, “Hale Woodruff.”
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On View

East Building Ground Level, Gallery 106-B

Artwork overview

Artwork history & notes

Provenance

Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. [1952-1997], Washington, possibly by 1987, certainly by 1989;[1] gift 1996 to the Corcoran Gallery of Art, Washington; acquired 2014 by the National Gallery of Art.
[1] A newspaper article dated 24 May 1987 describes Tibbs finding a landscape by Hale Woodruff in a shop "in the South a couple of years ago," that might be this painting (NGA Library, Vertical Files, Tibbs Archive, Series II, Box 7, Thurlow Evans Tibbs, Jr. file; copy in NGA curatorial files). The painting was lent to the exhibition of the Tibbs collection that began its multi-year tour in January 1989.

Associated Names

Exhibition History

1989

  • African-American Artists, 1880-1987: Selections from the Evans-Tibbs Collection, Smithsonian Institution Traveling Exhibition Service, more than twenty venues, January 1989 - November 1992, no. 37, fig. 34.

Bibliography

1997

  • Levy, Claudia. "Art Dealer Thurlow Evans Tibbs Jr. Dies." The Washington Post (17 January 1997): B:6.

2011

  • Cash, Sarah, ed. Corcoran Gallery of Art: American Paintings to 1945. Washington, 2011: 325, repro.

Inscriptions

lower left: Hale Woodruff

Wikidata ID

Q46635045

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