Andrew Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania in 1917, son of the well-known illustrator, N.C. Wyeth, who was his first art teacher. 

 

In October 1945, N.C Wyeth was killed by a train when his car stalled on train tracks near their home.  One of his grandsons, a 3-year old nephew of Andrew Wyeth, died with him. 

 

This tragedy altered Andrew Wyeth‘s view of the world and his artistic style.

 

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. 

 

He left a large record of his two homes – Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and the Maine known from childhood to his wife.

 

 

 

Snow Hill and detail, 1989, tempera on hardboard panel.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.

 

 

When he was 70, he painted this memorial to some of those he had known in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.  The ground on which they are dancing is sacred ground: Kuerner Hill.

 

There are seven ribbons and six people.

One white ribbon flies free. I imagine that that ribbon represents unknowable fate or, perhaps, life itself.  

The Brandywine Museum noted that this is both dreamscape and memorial to the people the Andrew Wyeth had known for the 50 years prior to this painting, at Chadds Ford.

 

 

 

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

 

Just as the white whale in Moby Dick represents, among other things, the limits of human understanding and the complexity of our lives and of life, so does this place in the life of the artist. 

 

For in the background are the railroad tracks where N.C. Wyeth and his 3-year-old grandson were killed in 1945. An event of incomprehensible fate and grief in the artist’s life and that of his family.

 

It was his father, this death, and this land and its people which made this artist.

 

The white ribbon not held by anybody in this painting may  be a call-out to Moby Dick, the great white whale, whose complex symbolism is embodied in the title of this painting.

 

Andrew Wyeth died in 2009 and is buried in Maine.

 

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These are the maypole dancers around this snow pole: 

 

Karl Kuerner.  The farmer on the extreme left in military coat and helmet.  A German immigrant, he had fought as a gunner in WWI, an experience which marked him and which deeply interested the artist.

 

 

The German, and detail, ink and dry brush watercolor on paper, 1975. 

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. Collection of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth.  

 

 

Andrew Wyeth had a long relationship with Karl Kuerner and his wife, Anna.

Karl Kuerner is holding hands with Anna.

 

 

Anna Kuerner, 1971, tempera on hardboard panel.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.  Private collection

 

 

The Kuerners gave him the run of their farm in Chadds Ford for 60 years.

That farm, which Wyeth drew more than 1000 times, was gifted to the Brandywine Museum, established to display and research the paintings of Andrew Wyeth, his family and the Brandywine Valley painters.

 

 

 

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.

 

Anna had never become reconciled to her exile from her German homeland.  Between her and her husband, no love was lost as the years moved on.

 

 

 

The Kuerners and detail, 1971, drybrush watercolour on paper. 

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American. Family collection.

 

 

 

Karl Kuerner became ill with leukemia and died in 1979.

He is the subject of a portrait of the artist’s meditation of the death which feeds life so that life may continue eternally. He places his friend at the bottom of the snowpole crest (Kuerner Hill) one year before he died.

 

 

 

Spring, 1978, tempera on hardboard panel. 

Brandywine River Museum.

 

 

 

 

 

Anna Kuerner‘s right hand is held by the one-armed Bill Loper who succumbed to mental illness. Wyeth painted Bill Loper and his brother, James, many times. 

 

 

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

 

 

 

Helga Testort is holding on to Bill Loper’s prosthetic hook.  Also an immigrant from Germany, she had come to take care of Karl Kuerner in his final illness.

 

Andrew Wyeth made more than 250 paintings of Helga Testorf.

This painting of her he gave his wife in 1976 without revealing who the subject was. 

 

 

 

Barracoon and detail, 1976, tempera on hardboard panel.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.  Family collection.

 

 

Betsy Wyeth, the namer of all her husband’s paintings and the record-keeper and historian of his entire oeuvre, gave this painting the name ‘Barracoon’ (a Spanish word for a temporary enclosure for slaves.)

Andrew Wyeth considered this his best nude painting.

Wyeth hid all his paintings of Helga, except ‘Barracoon’,  from his wife in the house of a friend.  In 1986, he revealed them all. 

 

This camouflage of a white woman in black skin says all of the complicated, antagonistic intimacy of black and white people in the history and present of North America. 

 

 

 

 

 

Moving to the right, on the other side of Helga is Allan Lynch, a neighbour. His life had ended in suicide. 

40 years before, Allan Lynch, a boy still, was the subject of a painting freighted with symbolism for the artist.

 

Lynch is running down  Kuerner Hill, chased by his shadow.  He is close to the railroad tracks where the artist’s father and nephew had been killed a few months earlier.

 

 

 

Winter, 1946, tempera on hardboard panel. 

North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh.

 

 

Andrew Wyeth said the boy represented himself and the grief he felt after losing his father: “his hand, drifting in the air, was my hand, groping, my free soul.”  The hillside was his father’s heaving chest.

This is a statement, of course, of his heart link with and unexpected liberation from his father.

 

 

Making up the circle is  Adam Johnson, another neighbour of the Wyeths, a pig farmer whom the artist painted often and saw as a fantastic and majestic figure.  At the rear of this painting is Adam Johnson‘s shed and haystack, itself a rich subject of great interest to the artist.

 

 

 

Fur Hat, Study for Adam, 1953, watercolour and pencil on paper.

Andrew Wyeth, 1917-2009, American.  Wyeth Foundation for American Art on display at the Brandywine Museum in 2025

 

 

 

Hog Pen, 1944, drybrush on paper.

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

 

 

At the rear of the ‘Snow Hill’ is Mother Archie’s octagonal church.

This church had originally been erected by Quakers in 1832 and had been bought by the African-American preacher, Lydia Archie, an ordained member of the African Union and Methodist Protestant Church. 

 

The church, an anchor for Chadds Ford’s black residents since its Quaker foundation, fell into disrepair after Archie’s death in 1932; and the congregation disbanded.  Andrew Wyeth was a witness and painter of this abandonment.

 

 

The artist had painted the subjects  of this painting many, many times but never again after the date of this memorial of the joy and grief of his life on this earth made sacred by their lives here together.