Queer Places:
H. Sophie Newcomb Memorial College, or Newcomb College, Newcomb Cir, New Orleans, LA 70118
Metairie Cemetery, 5100 Pontchartrain Blvd, New Orleans, LA 70124, United States

Ellsworth Woodward (July 14, 1861 - February 28, 1939) was born on July 14, 1861, in Seekonk, Bristol County, Massachusetts, and passed away on February 28, 1939, in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he was subsequently laid to rest in Metairie Cemetery. Throughout his adult life, he was married to Mary Bell Johnson Woodward. During the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Ellsworth and his older brother, William Woodward, emerged as two of the most influential figures in Southern art. Following a visit to the 1876 Philadelphia Centennial Exposition, the brothers pursued artistic paths, leading Ellsworth to study at the Rhode Island School of Design and later abroad in Munich under instructors such as Carl von Marr, Samuel Richards, and Richard Fehr. In 1885, Ellsworth relocated to New Orleans to join his brother on the art faculty at Tulane University, and two years later, he began his long tenure as a professor of art at Sophie Newcomb College, eventually serving as director of its art department from 1890 until his retirement in 1931.

Deeply influenced by the ideals of the Arts and Crafts movement, Woodward grew concerned about the effects of industrialization and machine manufacturing on aesthetics, advocating instead for social uplift through handcrafted objects for everyday use. He famously asserted that art and handicraft are Siamese twins and emphasized the primacy of locale, believing that only people raised in a specific place could adequately convey its natural beauty. To institutionalize this vision, he founded Newcomb Pottery on the Newcomb campus in 1895, combining local St. Tammany Parish clay with designs created by Southern women featuring regional motifs like oranges, palms, magnolias, and oak trees. Under his tutelage and with assistants such as Joseph Meyer, George Ohr, Mary Sheerer, and Paul Cox, Newcomb Pottery gained world renown, winning a Gold Prize at the Jamestown, New York arts and crafts fair in 1907 and five separate awards at the 1915 Panama-Pacific Exhibition in San Francisco to become the second-largest producer of individually decorated pottery in America. Although international acclaim eventually pressured the enterprise into faster production and turned its wares into elite collector items, Woodward's foundational role remained secure.

As a teacher, artist, and promoter, Woodward was a cornerstone of the New Orleans art scene between 1890 and 1940. He painted in an impressionist style all his life, specializing in landscape-structure, genre scenes, and etchings such as his French Quarter corner painting, Ursuline and Chartres. Beyond his classroom influence, his institution-building legacy included establishing the New Orleans Art Association in 1900, chairing the art committee at the newly established Isaac Delgado Museum of Art and serving as its president starting in 1924, and cofounding the Southern States Art League in 1920. Two years after his retirement, amid the Great Depression in 1933, he accepted an appointment as a regional director of the Public Works of Art Project, overseeing Region Six artists in Louisiana, Arkansas, Mississippi, and Alabama while balancing the tension between aiding needy artists and maintaining strict standards of excellence. Woodward's artwork is preserved in numerous prominent institutions, including the Charleston Museum, the Brooklyn Museum of Art, Louisiana State Museum, LSU Museum of Art, Lauren Rogers Museum of Art, Morris Museum of Art, Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Ogden Museum of Southern Art, and the Newcomb Art Gallery. An interesting modern discovery occurred in 2009 when a Goodwill Industries employee in Nashville, Tennessee, rescued a discarded Woodward painting from a trash bin, which was subsequently auctioned online for $8,000.

While Ellsworth Woodward’s life intersected with the rich, bohemian, and diverse cultural tapestry of historical New Orleans—an environment historically noted for welcoming alternative lifestyles and subcultures—scholarly documentation directly connecting him to personal LGBTQ+ identity or networks is limited. However, his professional realm within the early-to-mid 20th-century New Orleans art scene, including the broader cultural networks he helped foster, frequently provided creative sanctuary for many avant-garde and queer artists drawn to the city's distinct Creole and romanticized heritage.

In 1926 Pelican Bookshop Press, New Orleans, published "William Spratling and William Faulkner, Sherwood Anderson and Other Famous Creoles: A Gallery of Contemporary New Orleans", issued in 250 copies. The “Famous Creoles” (with ages in 1926) were

References:


Dixie Bohemia: A French Quarter Circle in the 1920s (Walter Lynwood Fleming Lectures in Southern History) Paperback – September 8, 2014
by John Shelton Reed

Other references:

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