‘BEHOLD, A NEW EDEN’
Laura Woodward paintings depict early Palm Beach
Sharing pictures of your vacation in Palm Beach wasn’t always as easy as whipping out your cell phone. Back in the 1890s, tourists’ best bet was to buy a painting by Laura Woodward.
Visitors to Henry Flagler’s newly opened Hotel Royal Poinciana devoured her paintings and prints of the island, which in those days was much wilder than the manicured winter retreat of today.
Just how lush and untamed it was can be seen in “Behold, A New Eden: Laura Woodward and the Creation of Palm Beach” at the Ann Norton Sculpture Gardens in West Palm Beach.
The exhibition features several paintings of sun-dappled, palmlined paths hugging the Palm Beach waterfront and Royal Poinciana trees bursting with fiery blooms. They’re typical of the work Woodward sold to visitors to her studio in the hotel and her cottage just south of where the Royal Poinciana Chapel is today.
But the show also gives a fuller picture of the artist, with works from several lenders that she painted in St. Augustine, Miami and elsewhere in Florida as well as examples of the type of paintings she created before she focused on the state.
Period photographs of Woodward’s Florida haunts round out the show. Without the historical context, “it would be just pretty pictures,” said Sandra Coombs, who organized the exhibition.
By the time Woodward discovered Palm Beach in 1889, she was an established artist in her mid50s. As one of the Hudson River School of painters, she had exhibited her work extensively in New York, Philadelphia and Boston.
To represent this period in her life, the show features an 1874 New England mountain scene and an 1886 painting of Gloucester Harbor in Massachusetts.
Woodward’s explorations of Florida began in the 1880s. By 1889, she was a member of the stable of artists attached to the Flagler’s Hotel Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine. A drawing for an 1890 cover of Harper’s Bazaar
magazine by Frederick Stuart Church portrays them in Florida, with him as a dapper alligator and Woodward at her easel.
She painted a number of works glorying in the city’s spectacular sunsets, such as the circa 1899 “Twilight on St. Augustine.” But she also struck out into the wilderness to paint scenes of Tomoka Creek, Ocklawaha River and Miami — all represented in the show.
In Woodward’s day few women became professional artists, much less trekked into uncharted land.
“She was a pioneer in this world,” said Roger Ward, the Ann Norton’s president and CEO.
She came to Palm Beach in search of more exotic tropical foliage to paint. At the time, the island was a jungle navigated by dirt paths and populated by mosquitoes, panthers, bears, wildcats, snakes and alligators — as well as a few intrepid pioneers.
You might think such hazards would have intimidated an artist who painted outdoors.
“It was the most beautiful place I had ever seen,” she told a reporter years later.
She used her paintings to help persuade Flagler to build the Hotel Royal Poinciana, Palm Beach’s first luxury resort, which opened in 1894.
“She knew she needed a grand hotel like she had in St. Augustine so she could sell her paintings and earn a living,” said Palm Beach art dealer Deborah Pollack, who wrote a biography of the artist and loaned the bulk of the show’s paintings.
A painting in the show documents the camp where the construction workers lived.
Woodward settled in Palm Beach in 1893 and was a prominent figure in the local art scene until her death in 1926.
A comparison between her paintings and the halftamed wilderness of the photographs suggests that she romanticized Palm Beach, as any good publicist would. Without her, it might not have become the picturepostcard destination it is today.