Susan Marcia Oakes was raised in South Berwick, Maine, the daughter of a traveling probate judge and homemaker. Striving to pursue her interest in the arts and to break free from the confines of her home life, she enrolled in a painting class taught by Tommaso Juglaris in Boston during the late 1880s.

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An exhibition of the Woodburys’ Dutch pictures held at Boston’s Chase Gallery in March of 1896 was commended by a writer for the Boston Evening Transcript, especially Marcia’s figural work: “Mrs. Woodbury, for her part, had thus been able to continue and extend her unequalled series of pictures of Dutch children by the addition of a number of new pages, each redolent of racy cuteness, each utterly honest and direct in its presentation of childhood as it is, and each appealing to the mingled feelings of sympathy and amusement which are responsive to the genuineness and the humorous side of the subject…[Her paintings] are creations full of vitality and sympathy, which will rank high among the best pictures of childhood.”[1]

 

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[1] “Exhibition of Pictures of Holland by Mr. and Mrs. Woodbury,” Boston Evening Transcript, March 20, 1896, p. 8.

Provenance:

Collection of the artist’s son

With Vose Galleries, Boston, inventory no. MOW-8, 1980

To private collection, Kansas City, Missouri, August 1981

Gifted to collector’s daughter and son-in-law, private collection, Denver, Colorado, to present

Inscription:

(top stretcher in pencil) Making Fudge

Labels:

1. Previous Vose Galleries label, inventory no. MOV-8
2. M.F.A. / Woodbury / 246.14 / Lent by / Charles H. Woodbury

Exhibitions:

1. Memorial Exhibition of Pictures by Mrs. Marcia Oakes Woodbury, Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, March 26 – April 16, 1914
2. Charles H. Woodbury, N.A. (1864-1940) and Marcia Oakes Woodbury (1865-1914), Vose Galleries, Boston, from May 13, 1980, illustrated on back cover of catalogue