Anne Baxter, co-executive director at The Foster, talks about Tony Foster’s “Bluebells—Looking WNW near the Top of Luxulyan Valley” (2014). The piece is part of the “Journey,” or series of works, called “Exploring Beauty: Watercolour Diaries from the Wild.” Photo by Magali Gauthier.
By Kate Bradshaw
November 18, 2021
As a kid, Palo Altan Jane Woodward dreamed of living in a museum. She spent her summers visiting her grandmother in Manhattan and loved to fantasize about what it would be like to live in the Metropolitan Museum, like the characters did in her favorite book, “From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler” by E. L. Konigsburg.
Woodward grew up to study geology at U.C. Santa Barbara and Stanford, then business at Stanford, but always retained her love for art and museums alongside her love of the wilderness, especially of the American West. She now teaches energy and environment courses at Stanford and is a founder and managing partner at MAP Energy, a renewable energy and natural gas investment firm, according to Stanford.
Decades ago, she said, she went to the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History and was struck by a chance encounter with several watercolors by Tony Foster. They depicted California’s High Sierras on a journey that Foster, a British watercolorist and explorer, had taken along the John Muir Trail.
Her encounter with those paintings launched within her a passion for the painter’s work that would, decades later, lead her to create one of the Peninsula’s premier museums, and one of the only museums dedicated to a living artist in the world, The Foster.
Full story here.
Kate Bradshaw 
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