Montpelier was a most unlikely birthplace for Thomas Waterman Wood, an artist who would eventually head both the National Academy and the American Watercolor Society — twin pillars of America’s 19th century art establishment. At the time of his birth in 1823, the capital boasted only about 2,400 souls and exposure to prevailing art and culture was scanty indeed.
     Yet Wood, the son of a local cabinetmaker and largely self-taught save for a few months instruction in the studios of Boston artist Chester Harding, would steadily rise in both public approval and the respect of his fellow artists.
     His capable work in portraiture was his bread and butter, but it was his shift into genre art, skillfully capturing everyday scenes of rural New England, that brought him a more enduring reputation. And it is these works that still enthrall modern viewers.
     America, after the convulsion of the Civil War, took refuge in storytelling art created by gifted genre painters such as Wood, Winslow Homer, J.G. Brown, and Eastman Johnson. Artists such as Norman Rockwell built upon this foundation.
     Wood insisted upon drawing the specifics of his subject matter, rather than resorting to idealized types. Working from a profusion of preliminary unsigned sketches and studies, he meticulously assembled his larger storytelling paintings such as “The Village Post Office,” “The Quack Doctor,” and “The Yankee Peddler” piece by piece from individual portraits, drawings of animals, and architectural features.
     The completed whole became far more than the sum of the individual parts. Wood’s pictures captured events in the life of his Montpelier or related compelling moral tableaux such as the accusing spouse imploring the saloonkeeper in “The Drunkard’s Wife.”
     Wood also employed delightful visual puns to accentuate the moral messages of his stories: a bevy of quacking ducks emerges from underneath the wagon of “The Quack Doctor,” and the final three letters of the name on the vehicle’s side (“I. M. Cheatham”) are obscured by a wagon wheel.
     It would be impossible to understand Wood’s life and work without underlining his and his wife, Minerva’s, affectionate relationship to Montpelier. Although Wood traveled widely around the country and Europe to execute his art projects, he returned regularly to Montpelier.
     While established either in the Pavilion Hotel or his Gothic cottage “Athenwood,” he painted scores of Montpelier locals who would later inhabit his hugely successful paintings such as “Crossing the Ferry,” “Arguing the Question,” or “Jump.” His relentless Yankee ethic resulted in an outpouring of oil paintings, watercolors and etchings. In his frequent portrayals of African-Americans, as in “Cornfield” and “The Faithful Nurse,” Wood avoided racial stereotyping, treating each figure individually.
     He also took time to banter with his neighbors, or to toss surplus apples from his small orchard to neighborhood children from the top of his retaining wall at Athenwood. (After his death in 1903, one of the floral tributes at his service bore the legend “Given by the children of Northfield Street,” where the cottage stands today, a private residence.)
     The death of his wife in 1889, after decades of disability, ended a remarkably intimate relationship. In his later years, Wood determined, with the cooperation of his longtime friend, Columbia University professor John W. Burgess, to give his hometown an art gallery. Opened in 1895, the T.W. Wood Art Gallery would include representative works of his own, as well as examples from artists such as William Beard, Asher B. Durand, J.G. Brown, F.S. Church, and Alexander Wyant.
     Wood also traveled to the great museums of Europe to copy splendid works of Rembrandt, Raphael, Murillo, Titian, Turner, and others. The results of these trips persist today in the Wood Art Gallery on the Vermont College campus in Montpelier.
     Wood represented the conservative wing of the American art establishment during his many years as president of the National Academy. Artist James Smillie termed Wood’s faction the “old fogy element” because Wood and his colleagues were less than enamored of the Impressionists and “French tendencies.”
     In vigorously portraying everyday characters, and creating vibrant storytelling pictures, few matched the sheer vitality and wonderful specificity of Wood. Each carefully rendered detail contributed to the resonance of the whole. His images of rural Vermont and the diverse natives of Montpelier continue to speak to audiences a century after Wood first drew these visions on canvas and paper.
     Perhaps he failed to meet Bertolt Brecht’s dictum that art should be a hammer that shapes society. But his evocative work nevertheless holds a mirror to the past, allowing us, albeit imperfectly, to enter into its culture to recapture precious moments of everyday life.

The late Richard Hathaway was a professor at Vermont College of Union Institute and a trustee of the Wood Gallery and Art Center. He thanked Paul Worman for the use of information from Worman’s forthcoming book on T.W. Wood. Reprinted with permission from Vermont Life magazine, Autumn, 1997.