Initially, Robert Wood was not listed in books and encyclopedias on Early California artists. Art historians and researchers assumed that his first California works were painted after his permanent move to California from Texas in 1941. In actuality, Wood told my father, Howard Morseburg, that he remembered the actual date of his first arrival in Los Angeles because as he got off the train, he heard the newspaper boys announcing news of the Titanic disaster. This places his arrival in Southern California in 1912, when he was an itinerant artist painting his way across the country.

Wood painted extensively on the west coast between 1910 and the early 1920s, when he lived in Seattle, Washington and Portland, Oregon, and traveled and sketched along the California coast, in the Sierras, and amidst the southern Cascades. Even when he lived in Texas, he took extensive sketching trips that brought him west to California. His California works of the 1930s show an awareness of California's famous Plein-Air School, which was then at the apex of its popularity.

Wood decided to move to the art colonies of Carmel and then Laguna Beach because he was already familiar with those locations from sketching trips. In the 1970s, my father asked Robert Wood about similarities between some of the artist's mountain scenes of the 1930s and 1940s and those of Edgar Payne. Wood told him that he had great admiration for Payne's broadly paintied compositions of the Sierras , and had learned a great deal from studying Payne's work.

Upon Wood's move to California from Texas, he painted some works of the rolling hills, eucalyptus and oak trees that are now thought of as the classic California landscape, but until late in life, when he moved to the Sierras, the majority of Wood's California work was devoted to the coastal landscape.