Richard La Barre Goodwin

Goodwin was born on March 26, 1840, in Albany, New York, the son of the portrait and miniature painter Edwin Weyburn Goodwin. He received no documented formal art school training; sources describe him as having studied with his father and as having studied painting, in general terms, in New York City. Letters preserved in the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art indicate he served in the Civil War, though the specifics of his service, rank, and regiment are not detailed in available records.

For roughly twenty five years Goodwin worked as a traveling portrait painter before turning primarily to still life. His practice moved with him: he is documented working in Syracuse, New York, in the 1880s, in Washington, D.C., in the 1890s, in Chicago from about 1893 to 1900, in Colorado Springs from 1900 to 1902, and in Portland, Oregon, from 1906 to 1908, where he exhibited at the Lewis and Clark Centennial Exposition in 1905. He returned to Rochester, New York, in 1908. He died on December 10, 1910, at age seventy. One source places his death in Orange, New Jersey, but this detail is not corroborated elsewhere in the record and should be treated as probable rather than confirmed.

Goodwin has not attracted the kind of sustained critical writing that surrounds his better known trompe l'oeil contemporaries, and no verbatim assessment from a named critic in a major outlet could be confirmed for this profile. Dealer and auction house catalogue notes consistently describe him as a specialist in high-style trompe l'oeil cabin-door compositions and fish-and-game still lifes, and place him within the same American illusionistic still-life tradition associated with William Harnett and John Peto. His standing rests less on published criticism than on the durability of that niche and on the presence of his paintings in academic and regional museum collections.

Goodwin's auction market is small and infrequent. The highest price identified in the available record is USD 62,500, paid for Still Life with Game and Hunting Paraphernalia (1904), a cabin-door composition sold at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on December 5, 2013. Other traced results, including a Wigeon and Teal estimated at USD 10,000 to 20,000, fall well below that figure, and no auction house has published a comprehensive lifetime sales record for him. His paintings continue to surface through American art specialists such as Schwarz Gallery and through general and regional auction houses, rather than through any dedicated program of gallery representation or estate management.

There is no catalogue raisonne for Goodwin, and no evidence of a formal estate or exclusive gallery representation; attribution and provenance work generally rely on dealer records, auction house catalogues, and the Goodwin family papers held by the Smithsonian's Archives of American Art. The market is thin, with a wide gap between a small number of major cabin-door compositions and more modest still lifes, so any single sale should be weighed against that spread rather than treated as a stable benchmark. Buyers should also be careful with the name itself: auction and gallery records render it variously as Richard La Barre Goodwin, Richard LaBarre Goodwin, and Richard Labarre Goodwin, and it is unrelated to the twentieth-century American speechwriter and presidential adviser Richard N. Goodwin.