Charles Woodbury painted in quick, sure strokes, according to his maxim: “Paint in verbs, not nouns.”
‘The Red Bathing Suit’ below is typical Woodbury: an energetic, shimmering work painted in one of his favorite spots, a pool on the coast of Ogunquit, Maine. The subject is one of three girls who wore red bathing suits so their father could keep an eye on them while they played in the water.
The Red Bathing Suit
From his teenage years throughout his life, Charles Woodbury enjoyed remarkable success as a painter of seascapes and coastal villages.
Charles Woodbury
Charles Woodbury was born July 14, 1864 in Lynn, Mass. He took a full load of courses at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology — all the while exhibiting paintings. He was largely self-taught. At 19, he became the youngest member of the Boston Art Club.
Charles Woodbury
Woodbury graduated from MIT with a degree in mechanical engineering, but he never had to use his degree for a day job. From early on he belonged to the Lynn Beach Painters, an often-overlooked school of art. Other Lynn Beach painters include Nathanial L. Berry, Edward Burrill, William Partridge Burpee, C. E. L. Green, Thomas Clarkson Oliver and Edward A. Page.
He painted the coast from Boston’s North Shore to Nova Scotia.
He studied in Paris and Holland while in his late 20s, then established a winter studio in Boston. Summers he spent in Ogunquit, Maine, a small fishing village on the coast. Later in life he spent winters in the Caribbean, painting watercolors and sailing from island to island.
Perkins Cove, Ogunquit
Woodbury started a summer art school in Ogunquit that continued on after his death on Jan. 21, 1940.
His work can be viewed in Boston at the Museum of Fine Arts, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum and the Harvard University Art Museums; at the Addison Gallery of American Art, in Andover, Mass.; in Maine at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, the Portland Museum of Art and the Bowdoin College Museum of Art in Brunswick; in New Hampshire at the Currier Museum of Art in Manchester; and in Rhode Island at the Rhode Island School of Design in Providence.
With thanks to Avery Galleries. Photo of Charles Woodbury by unknown photographer.
