In the decades following the Civil War, John Douglas Woodward (1846-1924) produced hundreds of landscape images of the United States, Europe, and the Holy Land for popular books and magazines, such as Hearth and Home, Picturesque America, and Picturesque Palestine, Sinai and Egypt. For the many thousands of Americas who were intensely curious about their newly reunited and westward-expanding nation and how it compared with its trans-Atlantic neighbors, his compositions provided welcome answers. From the hundreds of drawings he made on these assignments, scholars Sue Rainey and Roger B. Stein analyze the stages in Woodward's creative process from on-site drawings to book and magazine illustrations designed to meet the demands of publishers and their audiences. The opportunity to compare drawings with the later prints -- in this case wood and steel engravings -- is rare, since they were usually discarded. Fortunately Woodward saved his, and together with numerous letters, they offer the reader new insights into the working methods of a mineteenth-century landscape illustrator who sought to combine conventions of popular books of picturesque views with new viewpoints and experimental formats.Shaping the Landscape Image, 1865-1910: John Douglas Woodward. with essays by the authors and an annotated listing of over ninety works, serves as the catalog for an exhibition of the artist's drawings, prints, and watercolor and oil paintings at the Bayly Art Museum of the University of Virginia.
