Richard La Barre Goodwin

Richard La Barre Goodwin was born March 26, 1840, in Albany, New York, the son of portrait and miniature painter Edwin Weyburn Goodwin. No school or degree for the younger Goodwin is documented in the surviving record. He is described as having studied with his father and, reportedly, in New York City, though the details of that training are not spelled out in the sources that survive. According to the Terra Foundation for American Art, he was wounded at the First Battle of Bull Run during the Civil War and discharged from the army; further specifics of his unit or length of service are not documented in accessible sources.

Goodwin worked as an itinerant painter for much of his career, producing portraits, landscapes, and still lifes of fruit, flowers, and kitchen scenes alongside the cabin-door compositions for which he later became known. Records place him in Portland, Oregon around 1906 to 1908 and in Rochester, New York around 1908 to 1910, before he settled in Orange, New Jersey, where he died on December 10, 1910, at the age of seventy. According to the Terra Foundation for American Art, he "fell into obscurity after his death," and his current institutional standing reflects a later rediscovery and collection of his work by American museums rather than sustained recognition during his lifetime.

Goodwin has not attracted the kind of sustained critical writing, in major newspapers or art journals, that would produce a documented body of named critical commentary, and no verbatim quotes from named critics in major outlets could be confirmed for this profile. His recognition today is primarily institutional: the Terra Foundation for American Art describes him as "a portrait and still-life painter... best known for his many renderings of simple cabin doors hung with the spoils and paraphernalia of the hunt." No major prizes, medals, or academy honors are documented for him in standard reference sources.

Goodwin's auction market is small and largely confined to American art and Americana specialty sales rather than the top tier of the secondary market. The highest price on record in accessible auction databases is USD 62,500, achieved at Heritage Auctions in Dallas on December 5, 2013, for Still Life with Game and Hunting Paraphernalia (1904), an oil on canvas. Other results tracked by Christie's, Artnet, MutualArt, and Invaluable for Goodwin sit well below that figure, and no higher public sale has been identified since 2013.

There is no catalogue raisonne and no gallery or estate currently represents Goodwin's work; pieces circulate through the secondary market and through dealers such as Schwarz Gallery, which has sold his work without claiming formal representation of an estate. The auction record is thin, with relatively few tracked sales and a top price of USD 62,500 in 2013. For a collector, the strongest signal of quality and value is museum comparables and provenance research, since public auction data alone is too sparse to establish a reliable price trend for his work.