18 Commercial Street, by David W. Dunlap (2008).
“The real founder of the art colony was a woman, in 1896,” Stephen Borkowski, former chairman of the Art Commission, wrote in 2014, as evidence grew that Dewing Woodward’s Cape Cod School of Drawing and Painting preceded Charles Hawthorne’s school by three or four years. Woodward, who trained in Paris, “stopped using the first name Martha midway in her career, when she found that her artwork was not receiving the attention that it deserved,” said Mary Sieminski, who is researching the artist’s life. Woodward owned No. 18 with her companion, the artist Louise Johnson. References are made to their property as Pungo, though a cottage by that name burned in 1907, and the current building on the site — originally the bake house at Long Point — is much older. The two women went on to establish a school near Woodstock, N.Y. Woodward moved to Miami, where she died in 1950.
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