Wilbur Winfield Woodward, Girl Picking Fleas From A Dog (1879)

WILBUR WOODWARD (1851 St. Omer, Decatur County, Indiana - 1882 Lawrenceburg Indiana)
Girl picking fleas from a dog
1879
Oil on panel
24 x 19 cm
Signed, located, and dated: WOODWARD / Paris / 1879
Label printed on the back: BRUYAS Rue de Seine 31 with the number 85 filled in by hand
Possibly the same painting exhibited in the Salon of 1879 as Une cour du vieux Paris, no. 3011

Born in rural Indiana, Wilbur Woodward studied at the McMicken School of Design in Cincinnati before leaving for Europe where he followed courses at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, and afterwards at the Académie Julien in Paris. Returning to Cincinnati for a year to teach at the McMicken, from the mid-seventies he settled permanently in Paris working as a painter and illustrator. Woodward had his studio at 22 rue Monsieur-le-Prince near the Odéon on the Rive Gauche. We know of only two paintings by Woodward, Springtime, a gift by the artist's parents to the Indianapolis Museum of Art, and the present Girl picking fleas from a dog, which may the same painting exhibited in the Paris Salon of 1879 with the title Une cour du vieux Paris. Woodward's training in Antwerp shows in his Flemish attention to still-life details and indeed the subject of picking flees which had previously been treated by the Golden Age painter Gerard Terborch. Woodward was a character, as a boy he had served as a drummer in the Yankee army during the Civil War, and once in Paris he kept his Yankee style with long hair and long cavalry boots - as well as entertaining his neighbours on the rue Monsieur-le-Prince by playing his banjo through the window.