Edwin Dickinson - Woodland Scene

The struggle to bring a picture to completion experienced in The Glen continued in Woodland Scene, 1929–35, on which he spent nearly four hundred sittings and twice changed the dimensions of (the seam attaching a strip of canvas on the left is just visible to the left of the inverted figure's shoulder; another strip he attached at the top was later removed and the right side was narrowed by 3¼ inches). Driscoll believed Dickinson's dissatisfaction with the picture, which he finally finished for his patron, made complete interpretation difficult. The one he offered links the sitter's stoic acceptance of her difficult situation after her husband's death with passages from Thomas Hardy's book The Woodlanders and his poem "In a Wood," in which Hardy portrays nature as engaged in a death struggle. Driscoll believes that Dickinson identifies with the subject's inner strength in facing disappointment and adversity. Ward cautions against trying to interpret the picture in terms of the sitter's biography; he notes that another sitter had originally posed for the seated figure, and both worked as models that Dickinson had used before.

Ward observes that this painting, like The Fossil Hunters, suggests the imagery of a dream, with its darkness, its floating figure, and the strange, mouthless figure who confronts the viewer. Ward suggests that the mouthless women that appear in several Dickinson paintings may refer to his mother, whom he can visualize, but cannot hear from. One is also struck by the contrast between the heavy coat on this figure and the nudity of the figure on the right who, except for her breast and right upper leg, is largely blanketed in smoke from a fire burning where her head would be, a contrast that Ward relates to the "burning passion of youth and the cold loneliness of old age." In the original picture, with more canvas on the right and less on the left, these figures would have been balanced against each other, and Ward believes, as in The Glen, that the picture represented Dickinson's struggle to reconcile the mourning he continued to do for his mother with the love he felt for his bride, a conflict that contributed to his inability to finish the painting in a way that satisfied him even after almost six years. He interprets the floating figure as the mother as he remembers her, with the rose, equated with a breast as a symbol of motherly love, and visually connected to the old woman's loins by the plow handle, as if it traced the path of her resurrection.