John Douglas Woodward (artist)

John Douglas Woodward (July 12, 1846 – June 5, 1924), usually simply J.D. or Douglas Woodward, was an American landscape artist and illustrator. He was one of the country's "best-known painters and illustrators". He produced hundreds of scenes of the United States, Northern Europe, the Holy Land, and Egypt, many of which were reproduced in popular magazines of the day.

Woodward was born on July 12, 1846 in Middlesex Co., Virginia, the son of John Pitt Lee Woodward and Mary Mildred Minor Woodward. The family moved while he was still very young and he spent his childhood in Covington, Kentucky, where J.P.L. Woodward became a successful hardware merchant. By 1861, at the age of 15 or 16, he had begun studying art under the German painter T.C. Welsch in nearby Cincinnati, Ohio. The family had Confederate sympathies and fled to Canada during the American Civil War. In 1863, though, John travelled to New York City where he studied until 1865 at Cooper Union and the National Academy of Design. He exhibited his first painting at the Academy in 1867.

Initially he tried to earn a living as a landscape artist, taking his inspiration from the countryside of Virginia. (His family had settled in Richmond after the war ended in 1865.) However, he found it impossible to earn a living from fine art alone and was drawn to book illustration. In 1871, he received his first commission from Hearth and Home magazine, which took him on a sketching tour of the South; these drawings appeared as wood engravings in the magazine.

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