Eudoxia Woodward

Eudoxia Muller Woodward (June 14, 1919 – January 20, 2008) was an American artist and chemistry researcher. She was known for her work with Edwin H. Land at the Polaroid Corporation, where her research helped produce the Vectograph and the earliest forms of Polaroid instant photography.

Born Eudoxia M. Muller in Flushing, New York to Olga Popoff Muller, a sculptor, and John Muller an architect, she grew up in New York City. She attended St. Agatha’s School for high school and received her bachelor's degree from Smith College and settled in Boston, Massachusetts.

While at Polaroid, she met Robert Burns Woodward, who had been hired as a consultant. They married in September 1946 and had two children.

Post-Polaroid career

After leaving Polaroid, she taught art at the Belmont Day School in Belmont, Massachusetts and at retirement communities.

The title of Woodward's 1977 art show in Boston, "Flowers - Art or Science?", exemplified the contradictions in her work. Her watercolor, "Pentagonal Red Hibiscus", displayed at a show in 1995 at the Francesca Anderson Fine Art gallery in Lexington, exemplified the unity she found in the two approaches to experience. For the "Pentagonal Red Hibiscus" she said she had plotted four views of the blossom against a pentagon. Her works have been shown in exhibitions at, among other sites, the DeCordova Museum, and her alma mater, Smith College.

Variously, Woodward served on the boards of the Boston Museum of Science, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts, and the Cambridge Art Association. In 2002, the New England Watercolor Society awarded Woodward the "Stanhope Framers Prize". In 2008, she died of cancer in her home in Belmont, Massachusetts.