Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

Andrew Wyeth is the among the greatest of the American realists and figurative painters in the second half of the 20th century.

 

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The Brandywine River Museum near Pennsylvania’s border with Delaware mounted an exhibition of some of his work for the one hundred year anniversary of his birth in 2017.

 

The artist’s output was very large.  A few of his works, represented below, were in this exhibition. (I have collected his portraits in a separate post). Some of those represented below are in other museums and galleries.

 

Portrait of his son, Andrew, by N.C. Wyeth, 1882-1945.

  This hangs in N.C. Wyeth’s studio, built 1911, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  I don’t know the date.

 

Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917, son of the well-known illustrator, N.C. Wyeth, who was his first art teacher (primarily watercolour).  N.C. Wyeth’s daughter, Carolyn, was also an artist.

 

 

 

Self-portrait with palette, 1909-1912, oil on canvas. 

N.C. Wyeth, 1882-1945. Family collection displayed at the Brandywine River Museum

 

 

 

My Father’s Studio, 1934, oil on canvas. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Collection of Betsy and Andrew Wyeth on display at the Brandywine Museum in 2018

 

 

In October 1945, N.C Wyeth was killed by a train on train tracks near their home.  One of his grandsons died with him. This accident is unexplained.

 

 

 

Walden Pond Revisited, 1932-33, oil on canvas.  

N.C. Wyeth, 1882-1945, American.  Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. 

An idealistic view of the philosopher and naturalist, Henry Davis Thoreau (1817-1862) for whose work the artist had a great admiration.

 

 

 

The Dusty Bottle, 1924, oil on canvas. 

 N.C. Wyeth, 1882-1945, American.  Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

 

 

 

The Springhouse, 1944, egg tempera on hardboard. 

N. C. Wyeth, 1882-1945. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

 

 

 

 

 

North Light, 1984, watercolour on paper. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Brandywine River Museum.

The studio of the artist’s father, N.C. Wyeth.   The studio was built in 1911 when N.C. Wyeth bought land for house and studio.

 

 

 

 

Open Shutter (Study for My Studio), 1974, watercolour on paper. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Collection of Betsy and Andrew Wyeth

 

 

 

Andrew Wyeth, who had already moved from watercolour to tempera to his father’s disappointment, acknowledged that his father’s death altered the way he painted. 

 

He treated the subjects of his work with more introspection.  He sharpened his style to pin-point clarity.  His subject matter became increasingly layered with personal meaning. His landscapes, often associated with actual people, emptied and often became more bleak.

 

 

 

The north window in N.C. Wyeth’s studio, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

 

 

 

The subjects of  Andrew Wyeth’s art include the physical environment of his two homes:  his natal home which was the farming country in the Brandywine Valley around Chadds Ford, about 35 miles south-west of Philadelphia 

 

 

A well-watered area, Swedes and then English Quakers and, later, Germans, have been in these Lenni Lenape lands in and around Chadds Ford since 1638.  Farming.

 

 

 

The Valley of the Brandywine, Chester County, Pennsylvania.  (September) 1886-87, oil on canvas

William Trost Richards, 1883-1905, American. Brandywine River Museum

 

 

 

and his adopted home:  the land through which runs the St. George River of inland Maine where his wife’s family owned a farm. 

Here he came to know both the Olsons and, later, the Eriksons.  All were subjects and friends for decades.

 

 

 

 

Osborne Hill (Crows in a Landscape), 1943, tempera on hardboard panel.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.  Brandywine River Museum

 

The highest point in the Brandywine River Valley.

The point from which the British organized the moves of their army in the Battle of the Brandywine in September 1777.

 

 

In Chadds Ford, he was given the run, for more than 60 years, of the Kuerner farm of his neighbours, Karl and Anna Kuerner, immigrant farmers from Germany. They settled in Chadds Ford in 1925.

 

 

 

 

The Kuerner Farm painted in watercolour 

Karl J. Kuerner, American born 1967. On display at the Brandywine Museum in 2024

The farm, a gift of  the Karl Kuerners,  father and son, is now part of the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum. It is also on the National Historic Monument registry.

 

 

 

Wyeth’s earliest representation of the farm was in 1932 when he was 15.  In 1976, Betsy Wyeth, his wife, published a record of 376 works by the painter of this farm.

 

He also painted members of the African American community who lived in the area, some of whom worked on the farms around.  

 

Andrew Wyeth’s early watercolours of the 1930s were a success and in New York.

 

Thereafter, realism was up against large movements initiated in the United States by Marcel Duchamp and, later, by the New York School:  away from realism and figuration and towards abstract expressionism,  conceptual art, minimalism and all the derivations which flourish still. 

 

Wyeth’s work was widely disparaged by critics from the late 1940s onwards. 

 

A mid-70s one-man exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum, NY did not raise his profile with critics.

 

Critics panned the ‘Helga paintings’ and drawings on display at the National Gallery in Washington DC in May 1987.

 

 

 

Cover of  the catalogue of the 1987 exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s paintings at the National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

 

 

Wyeth is habitually referred to, with disdain, as a ‘mid-century’ painter as if he had not lived and worked throughout the last five decades of the 20th century and into the first years of the 21st century.  He is also referred to as a ‘regional’ painter. 

 

Regional he may have been in a geographic sense. And, of course,  Pennsylvanians and citizens of Delaware who know his work are appreciative of his painted record of a part of their rural history: a life now all but disappeared in these areas.

 

But the universal referents of his work are clear from his unflinching depictions of the relationship of humans to each other and to the land on which they live; to their animals and farms, their houses (rooms, doors, curtains, spaces, instruments of work and domestic ware) also.

 

To love, to female beauty, to friendship, and to desire.  To weathers of all kinds. To memory, to aging and to death. 

 

Attachment to place and its people, history and artifacts has a universal value because it is infused, as Andrew Wyeth pointed out, with personal memory and emotion.

 

His paintings are ‘fierce’, so acute is the distilled vision: a vision sharpened by and infused by the death of his father.

 

 

 

Pennsylvania Landscape, 1941, tempera on panel.

  Andrew Wyeth,1917-2009, American.  Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA

“I think of it as the whole Pennsylvania landscape,” Wyeth said. ” with that marvelous buttonwood tree in the middle. I am almost suspended looking down…”

 

 

 

Andrew Wyeth persisted despite the critical disapprobation.  Nor, unlike the painter Edward Hopper in 1960, did he go into open warfare against the dominance of the Abstract Expressionists.  By 1960, of course, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg  and Jasper Johns were, in any case, already on the scene to force a retreat of the Abstract Expressionists and blow open the doors of North American art.

 

And the figurative artists have again – at the beginning of a new century – come into their own again.

 

So that when you look at his last painting, Goodbye, of a few months before his death, a gift to his wife, you can see his life as he saw it. 

 

On the one hand, strong and stable, functional, useful (the structure is a sail barn which was a gift from his wife and moved to this site atop a bluff).   A whole architecture of clarity and rectitude. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

And then, submerged in the water, its reflection: unsteady, unstable, fleeting, its shades and outlines and volume changing with every passing  ripple and wave and with the time of day.  Free of human control and expectations.  Free.

 

The artist’s boat has made its way between the two representations: the exposed in his life and the unexposed.  The journey to continue somewhere beyond our view and knowledge.

 

 

Goodbye, tempera with pencil on hardboard, 2008.

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007.  Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth.

 

This painting of a Maine sail loft and cove was named, as all of his paintings, by his wife, Betsy Wyeth. Her first name for it was ‘Sail Loft’. 

After her husband died, she renamed it ‘Goodbye, My Love’ and finally ‘Goodbye’.

 

The artist died in Chadds Ford and was buried in the Olson family graveyard in Cushing, Maine.

 

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Having mined a rich wake-seam, the artist left a heritage as rich:

his son, Jamie Wyeth, a formidable artist himself.  Realism, figuration, surrealism.

 

 

 

Angus and detail, oil on canvas, 1974.

  Jamie Wyeth, born 1947, American.  Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

 

 

 

The artist left a thriving community at Chadds Ford dedicated to the preservation of his art and that of his family and associates; and the preservation and display of (North) American art;

 

 

 

The Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in a converted and expanded nineteenth century mill

 

 

 

The artist has left students, and a public whose admiration for his work continues to grow.

 

Outside the Brandywine Museum, a man, an artist, told me that he had driven 10 hours from the state of Indiana as soon as he heard of the exhibition of Andrew Wyeth’s work in the 100th year of his birth.  He was overwhelmed with ideas which Andrew Wyeth’s work had given him; and he was due to drive 10 hours back.  “I have a lot of work to do” he said.

 

Connected to the museum but a separate effort is also a conservation of land in Pennsylvania.  This was initiated by a gift of land by a Wyeth friend, neighbour, and student, a member of the du Pont family, George (‘Frolic’) A. Weymouth (1936-2016, American). To this others have added gifts of land in eastern and western Pennsylvania. 

 

The full name of the institution of which the museum is part is the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art;  and these conserved lands are administered and maintained by a part of this institution.

 

 

 

 

Frolic (1936-2016), oil, enamel and acrylic on canvas, 2017. 

 Jamie Wyeth, American born 1947.  Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

 

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The Brandywine Valley, Pennsylvania

 

 

Hoffman’s Slough, 1947, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Everson Museum of Art, Syracuse, NY 

 

This view across the Brandywine Valley, simplified for the removal of foreground details, was included in the Whitney Annual exhibition of 1947.  This is the land where the artist grew up.

 

 

 

Winter Fields, 1942, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Whitney Museum of (North) American Art, NY 

Thought to be a metaphor for the war then in progress.

 

 

 

 

Snow Flurries and detail, tempera on hardboard panel, 1953. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Pennsylvania’s hills in winter which, with autumn, were the artist’s favourite seasons.

 

 

 

 

Winter and detail, 1946, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

 

The museum noted that the inspiration for this painting was  a Wyeth neighbour,  Allan Lynch, running down Kuerner Hill near the railroad tracks where the artist’s father and his nephew were killed a few months earlier. 

The running child represented loss to the artist and the hillside his father’s breathing chest.

 

The houses in the Chadds Ford area were made of fieldstone or rubble.  Some buildings were made of manufactured bricks and lumber. 

Others were made of stone towards the end of the 18th century when some farming families had begun to prosper.

 

 

 

Nightsleeper and detail, 1979, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Wyeth Family collection.

The Wyeth’s dog, Nell, asleep on a window seat in the Wyeth home.  On the left a gristmill.  On the right the Brandywine River

 

 

 

Toll Rope, 1951, tempera on Masonite. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington

 

 

 

 

Sparks, 2001, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. The National Arts Program, Malvern, Pennsylvania 

The artist has distorted the perspective and size of the room and elongated the room

 

 

 

 

 

Detail of Chain Hoist, 1965, watercolour.

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Courtesy of the Sommerville Manning Gallery, Breck’s Mill, Greenville, Delaware

 

 

 

 

The Tide Mill, 1968, watercolour. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Courtesy of the Sommerville Manning Gallery, Breck’s Mill, Greenville, Delaware

 

 

 

 

Woodshed, 1944, tempera on panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Brandywine River Museum

 

 

 

Thin Ice and detail, 1969, tempera on hardboard panel.

 Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Private collection, Japan loan to the Brandywine River Museum in 2019.

The artist’s work has been popular in Japan since the 1970s for his attachment to nature and the still, meditative quality of his work.

 

 

 

The African-American community in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

 

 

Bill Loper with Big Tree Trunk, 1934, oil on canvas.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. Wyeth Foundation for American Art on display at the Brandywine River Museum in 2022

 

William (Bill) Loper, 1874-1944, was part of a large Chadds Ford family and the first person from the Black community whom Wyeth painted, in 1932.  Loper and his brother, Ben, were frequent Wyeth subjects.

 

 

 

John Lawrence loading Fence Rails, 1934, oil on canvas. 

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. Wyeth Foundation for American Art on exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum in 2022.

 

John Lawrence, 1886-1970, was the father of Wyeth’s childhood friend, David Lawrence.  The family moved away from Chadds Ford in 1938.

 

 

 

 

Bringing Wood, 1937, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American, Wyeth Foundation for American Art on display at the Brandywine River Museum in 2022

 

Painted when the artist was 19, this was the home of his childhood friend, David Lawrence. 

This painting and other watercolours launched Andrew Wyeth‘s career when they were exhbited in New York.

 

Commentary by an African-American art historian on the exhibition at the Brandywine Museum on the artist’s 100th birthday ran to lines familiar in the endless racial conflict in the United States. 

 

The art historian said that the artist ‘used’ members of the Afro-American community for the furtherance of his art and, in some cases, denied them their ‘humanity’.  This was represented as an abuse of poor people.

 

 

 

 

Hog Pen, 1944, drybrush on paper.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. Brandywine River Museum, Chadds, PA on view in 2022

Sheds and outbuildings on the chicken and hog farm of Adam Johnson were the subject of many drawings and paintings.

 

 

 

 

Painted Post Study, 1983; tempera on panel.  

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.  Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art on exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA in 2022.

 

Othaniel Winfield (1908-1996) shown on the porch of his house which Andrew Wyeth also painted (below).  Winfield was a self-employed upholsterer and also managed the boiler operations at Cheyney University, the oldest of all the historically black universities in the United States.

 

 

 

 

Demolished, June 1995, watercolour on paper, 1995.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.  The Wyeth Foundation for American Art on exhibit at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA in 2022.

 

The home of the Davis and Winfield families, both of whom Andrew Wyeth knew and painted over many years. They were members of an African American church in Concord Township: the Spring Valley AME Church which lasted 100 years until 1980.

Andrew Wyeth was often at dinner at this house with Andrew Davis; and at social events at the church also.

 

 

I don’t agree with this evaluation.

 

Andrew Wyeth grew up with members of this Black community.  One of them was his closest friend in adolescence.  He knew many of them by name and painted them repeatedly.  This meant keeping time with them and talking with them.  He broke bread with them.

 

 

 

Graveyard at Archies, 1934, oil on canvas. 

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. The Wyeth Foundation for American Art on display at the Brandywine Museum, Chadds Ford, PA in 2022

 

Museum guidance is that in 1934, Lydia Archie, 1844-1932, bought a building in Chadds Ford originally erected by Quakers in 1839.  This building from its origins had always been an anchor of the Black community. 

Lydia Archie was an ordained member of the African Union Methodist Protestant Church and she established there the Ebenezer Independent Methodist Episcopal Church which the African-American community called ‘Mother Archie’s Church’. 

The building fell into disrepair after her death in 1932 and the congregation disbanded. 

Attempts to make sure that the graveyard was not disturbed and was not built over were successful. 

 

 

 

Burial at Archies, 1934, oil on canvas. 

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2007, American.  Wyeth Foundation for American Art on display at the Brandywine Museum of Art, Chadds Ford PA in 2022

 

 

What, one wonders, would any commentator have said if Andrew Wyeth had, in the course of his long life in eastern Pennsylvania, painted no African-Americans? 

 

Or if evidence had emerged that he had gated himself, family, studio and work and simply refused to deal with African-Americans at all? 

 

An opportunity was lost by this African American commentator to shed light on the interaction of white and black Americans in this community.

 

Wyeth painted people and the places they inhabited and the things they used without differentiating the quality of his interest, focus, or effort. 

An artist, in other words.  An artist.

 

 

 

Bushel Basket Study and detail, 1958, watercolour on paper with drybrush. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Wyeth Family collection.

 

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Other paintings of the Chadds Ford countryside

 

 

Firewood (Study for Ground Hog Day), 1959.  Drybrush and watercolour on paper. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Courtesy of the Sommerville Manning Gallery, Breck’s Mill, Greenville, Delaware

 

 

 

 

First Snow and detail, 1959, watercolor on canvas. 

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009,  American.  Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington.

A painting of the farmhouse belonging to the Kuerners.

 

 

 

 

Brown Swiss Study, 1957, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

 

Groundhog Day, 1959; tempera on panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

 

 

 

Study for ‘The Mill’, 1962, opaque and transparent watercolour with scraping, over graphite on heavy cream wove paper. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1917-2009. Philadelphia Museum of Art

 

 

 

Tenant Farmer, 1961, tempera on masonite. 

Delaware Art Museum.

The artist said that this deer seemed to him to be almost a part of the building.  Then he dreamt of an invasion by hundreds of deer and he got rid of the image in his mind by painting this.

 

 

 

Study for Tenant Farmer, 1961, watercolour on paper.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Untitled (Big Bend), 1961;  watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

Evening at Kuerner’s, 1970, watercolour on paper with drybrush. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Collection of Nicholas Wyeth.

 

The museum noted that Karl Kuerner, whose room it is lit up, was very ill at the time this was painted and that that light represented the farmer’s ‘flickering soul’.

 

 

 

 

Spring Fed, 1967, tempera on hardboard. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Private collection.

 

The Museum notes that this is an old springhouse on the Kuerner farm.  Milk in the stone sink was chilled by piped spring water. 

The artist infused this real place with childhood fantasies of medieval knightly life and also the sadness surrounding his father’s death.

 

 

 

 

 

Cooling Shed and detail, 1953, tempera on hardboard. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Philadelphia Art Museum 

A milk cooling shed on the Wylie Farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. 

The museum noted that the artist said that this portrayal is an abstract in every way and that he did not see himself as either a realist or an abstractionist. 

He did not embrace photographic realism and his efforts were to represent the thing or person or place and its spirit.

 

 

 

Burning Trash, 1963, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

The Hatton House, 1967, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Slight Breeze Study, 1968, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Slight Breeze, 1968, tempera on panel

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

747, 1980, tempera on panel

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Tree House Study, 1982; watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Battleground Study, 1984, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

The Battle of Brandywine, a Revolutionary War battle was fought on September 11, 1777 very near Chadds Ford.

The British won the battle and, unopposed, entered Philadelphia late that September.

 

 

 

 

The Forge Study, 1984, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Untitled (Brinton’s Mill), 1985, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

Untitled (The Academy) 1987, watercolour on paper

(formerly on Route 322; torn down)

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Untitled (John Andress House), 1943, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Young Bull and detail, 1960, drybrush watercolour on paper.

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Collection of Nicholas Wyeth on display at the Brandywine River Museum in 2017. 

On the Kuerner Farm.

 

 

Painter’s Folly, 1989, tempera on panel

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

The artist was given the run of this property by its owners, Helen and George Sipala, who lived in Chadds Ford,

The Museum notes that ‘Marriage’ was painted from the artist’s experience one morning in this house.

 

 

 

Widows Walk Study, 1990, watercolour and pencil on paper

Andrew Wyeth,1917-2009, American

 

 

 

Raccoon and detail, 1958, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Brandywine River Museum

Abused hunting dogs.

 

 

Detail of Chain Hoist, 1965, watercolour. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Courtesy of the Sommerville Manning Gallery, Breck’s Mill, Greenville, Delaware

 

 

 

 

Airborne, 1966, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, Arkansas

The Museum noted that violence is being intimated on a brilliantly sunny day.

 

 

 

Swifts – First Version, 1991, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Untitled (The Craig Farm), 2003, watercolour and pencil on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

 

Ark Study, 2004, watercolour on paper

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American

 

 

 

Lime Banks and detail, 1962, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Private collection.

 

 

 

 

 

The Carry, 2003, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Private collection.

 

 

 

 

Andrew Wyeth, American, 1919-2007. Snow Hill, 1989. tempera on hardboard panel.

 

The museum notes that this is both dreamscape and memorial to the people the artists had known for 50 years at Chadds Ford.  The artist painted it in his 70th year.  The one ribbon flying free represents him.

Its name is from the moment in Moby Dick when the great white whale is finally sighted: “A hump like a snow-hill! It’s Moby Dick!”

Karl Kuerner is is a military coat on the extreme left holding hands with Anna.  Her hand is held by Bill Loper.  Then there is Helga.  Making up the circle are thought to be Allan Lynch and Adam Johnson.

In the background are the railroad tracks where N.C. Wyeth and his 3-year-old grandson were killed when their car was stalled.  An event of great moment in the artist’s life and that of his family.