Wood Gaylor (1884–1957) was an American artist known for his colorful canvases of festive events painted in a flat, unmodeled style that struck critics as "witty" and "wisely naïve".

Known as a "fun-loving iconoclast" of the art world, he was also a businessman, who, in a long and successful career, worked his way up from office boy to head of a firm that manufactured sewing patterns.

[4] In 1979, another Times critic discussed the features that distinguished his work, writing, "Although Mr. Gaylor's paintings appear to be primitive, they are only superficially so.

Their simple, charming figures and clean, unshaded colors are organized in meticulously orchestrated compositions that are clearly the work of a sophisticated hand."

[3] When he was 16, during a time when his family was located in Manhattan, Gaylor left school and took work as an office boy for a company that made sewing patterns.

[6][7] Thereafter, continuing to work in the sewing pattern industry, he advanced in position from designer, to assistant manager, to head of Manhattan-based companies in that business until he retired not long before his death.

[6] In 1915, he painted an abstract work (shown at right) and became a member of the short-lived Cooperative Mural Workshop run by Katherine Dreier and her sister Dorothea.

[14] In reviewing the group show, a critic described the painting called "Dawn" that Gaylor contributed as "well designed, but with terra cotta colored and non-modeled figures of a father and mother whose child is darker than they are.

[15] In 1917, Gaylor joined Kuhn and others in a short-lived group called the Penguin Club which, like the Armory Show, aimed to provide support for artists who rejected the conservative aesthetics of the National Academy.

An hour later, the dancing was interrupted for what the reporter called a "spectacle which even the most ardent member declared could grace a Spanish-American village only upon the most abnormal and arduous day".

[20] In 1920, Gaylor made a dramatic painting showing members of the Penguin Club preparing posters in aid of a Red Cross bond drive (shown at right).

That year, he also had two small etchings in a group exhibition at the Montross Galleries one of which drew forth from a New York Times critic a comparison Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Genevieve" "in the purity of its medieval spirit".

[21] The following year, a critic described a low-relief wood carving by Gaylor as "a gay little childish free gesture", saying, "It will be seen, and rightly, as an artist's idea triumphantly carried out".

It showed Chinese, ancient Greek, and modern French masters, such as Cézanne, Picasso, and Gauguin, along with works made by its own members.

[26] In 1932 Gaylor showed portrait studies in watercolor and pencil along with his more familiar oil paintings of festive Greenwich Village scenes in a solo exhibition at the Downtown Galleries.

[35][36] Gaylor's late painting "Fourteenth Street" (shown at right) revisits a scene from 1917 in Manhattan and shows a social-conscience side of his approach to art.

Clearly, Gaylor is equating the sordid message in the movie "Traffic in Souls" with the oppressive workload of the seamstresses, whose sweatshop labors provide the attire of the well-dressed group in the lower half of the picture.

A critic for the New York Times said the works shown were "full of clever anecdotes and witticisms smuggled in under a naïve deadpan" and added that the Greenwich Village Bohemianism which was their subject would be difficult to depict in any other manner.

The critic added that the figures "are organized in meticulously orchestrated compositions that are clearly the work of a sophisticated hand" and described his style as "an alternative to both academic and abstract art".

[4] One said he showed "la vie Bohème in the Greenwich Village... done in a primitivist style that sends simplified little people running like clockwork toys all over the place in flat, knowingly spaced compositions.

[38] They called his work clever and amusing, as one said, "full of vivacity and bright color, and with the careful arrangement inevitable where spontaneous appearance is successfully maintained.

However, as noted above, he also made carved and painted wood reliefs and many works on paper: etchings, drypoints, aquatints, and watercolors and these, in their time, also received critical praise.

[53] The couple lived in Bergen, New Jersey She took art classes at the New York School of Applied Design for Women and he worked as a draftsman.

[55] In the early teens of the twentieth century, Gaylor found work in New York at Butterick's, a company that made garment patterns for home sewers.

[38][60][62] In 1934, after spending summer vacations in Glenwood Landing for two years, they moved permanently to that Long Island hamlet and Lawson remained there following Gaylor's death in 1957.