During the late 19th century in New Orleans, Ellsworth and his older brother William Woodward were two of the most influential figures in Southern art.

Ellsworth was born 1861 in Seekonk, Massachusetts, but the two brothers made New Orleans their home (around 1876) and devoted themselves to promoting Southern culture and art as artists, teachers and administrators.

Ellsworth Woodward is best known for founding the Newcomb Pottery movement, and for his landscape-structure, genre, etcher.

[1] Woodward was born in 1861 in Seekonk, Massachusetts, and died in 1939 in New Orleans, Louisiana, where he spent the majority of his adult life.

In 2009, an employee of Goodwill Industries in Nashville, Tennessee discovered a Woodward painting that was about to be discarded in a trash bin.