Wyeth's Women

Andrew Newell Wyeth, was born (12th July 1917) in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, United States, the youngest of five children to the successful American artist / illustrator Newell Convers and Carolyn Wyeth. His father, the great illustrator of such childhood classics as Kidnapped and Treasure Island.
Wyeth was one of the most popular American Realist painters of his time. His paintings, meticulously rendered, convey a deep sympathy for people and a sense of the hardness and brevity of life. This paintings won the reclusive artist a tremendous amount of fame; their quiet views of landscapes and figures seem quintessentially American and timeless. He learned to paint with the keen observation and the drafting skills that his father pocessed. The hullabaloo over Andrew Wyeth's "secret' paintings" casts doubt on his talents, raising the question. Is Wyeth really an artist at all? Such redoubtable critics as Hilton Kramer said No: Wyeth is not an artist, he's an illustrator.... I don't agree he was a master of the brush.

Andrew was a weak and sickly child. He studied at home, although he never really mastered spelling. Mostly, he roamed the countryside in solitude or stayed in the house playing with tin soldiers. Imbued with the love of narrative that shines from his father's work, Andrew spent almost a year creating a miniature theater. They were the players, sets, and costumes for a one-man production of Arthur Conan Doyle's romance The White Company, which he presented to the family at age 15. Deeply impressed by Andrew's virtuosity, his father immediately took him on as apprentice and student. When Wyeth was ten his family began spending summers in Maine, a tradition the artist continued throughout his entire life. During his teenage years, Wyeth's early forays into watercolor painting were of the Maine landscape and ocean vistas, and with these he enjoyed his first one-man show at New York's William Macbeth Gallery in 1937. All of the works were sold, but Wyeth felt almost disheartened by his early success. He began to experiment with rendering the human form, perhaps the most difficult of all subjects. As an exercise, his father recommended that he sketch a skeleton from every possible angle. His work as a young American artist of this period set him apart from his contemporaries, who were busy experimenting with more radical, abstract styles. Noted art critic John Russell remarked to Newsweek that Wyeth's "work has always had a secret and subterranean motivation, conscious or unconscious, which surfaces in strange and unexpected ways."

In 1945 Wyeth's father was killed at a railroad crossing in Chadds Ford, and the sudden death made Wyeth resolve to take his artistic career more seriously. He began to use models, often painting them over several years, a practice which he began in 1939 when he met Christina Olson. The Maine woman was a friend of Betsy Merle James, who would later become Wyeth's wife. Olson was paralyzed from polio, and Wyeth's image of her in a field, Christina's World (1948), is perhaps his most famous work. He continued to render Olson, or her Maine house, in a series of works that stretched on until the late 1960s, including Miss Olson (1952) and Weather Side (1965).
Wyeth and his wife Betsy bought a set of farm buildings in Chadds Ford dating back to the 18th century and restored it as a studio for him and a home for the couple and their two sons, Jamie and Nicholas. (Jamie would eventually become a painter himself). In the late 1940s Wyeth became fascinated with Karl Kuerner, a farmer of German origin who lived nearby, and Wyeth painted images of Kuerner and his property, as well as his wife Anna, over the next few decades. In Maine, where the Wyeth family spent the summer months, the artist also befriended another neighbor who became a frequent subject. Teenaged Siri Erickson was the subject of several portraits that Wyeth painted during the 1960s.
Most major American museums have examples of Wyeth's work. He was given a large retrospective at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in 1967. Earlier, and for many years, he was more or less systematically ignored by American art officials, although not by critics, because his work seemed so completely removed from mainstream American art. President John F. Kennedy awarded him the Medal of Freedom in 1963, and The National Institute of Arts and Letters bestowed its 1965 gold medal for Wyeth's artistic achievements. In 1970 Wyeth then had a one-man exhibition in the White House, the first ever held there.

Sadly this "Painter of the People" passed away peacefully on the 16th January 2009 aged 91