Background
Woodward was born to a stable, affluent family in Providence, Rhode Island, where she spent most of her life, except for a brief period in San Francisco and many summers in Ogunquit, Maine.
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Mabel Woodward
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She began her studies at the Rhode Island School of Design in 1896. She graduated with highest honors. Later in 1898 she attended the Art Students League of New York, studying under Kenyon Cox and Frank Duveneck.
She also studied for a time at the Ogunquit School of Art in Maine with Arthur Wesley Dow and Charles Woodbury.
Career
Her family gave her the "finest domestic art education then available." She was faculty at the Rhode Island School of Design for over twenty years. She painted during her summer vacations. She was a longtime member and the first woman president of the Providence Art Club.
Woodward was one of Rhode Island"s best-known artists in the 1920s and 1930s.
But by the early 1950"s, interest in her work had dwindled to the point where her family sometimes gave her paintings away. Upon her death in 1945, she was almost totally unknown, as the art world favored French Impressionists over American Impressionists generally.
By the later part of the 20th Century, interest in American Impressionists slowly returned. Woodward"s work began to be rediscovered, and some of her larger portraits and beach studies have sold in the six-figure range.
Her work was included in an exhibition of "neglected American impressionists" in Boston in 1972, and a small retrospective exhibition at the Providence Art Club in 1992.
