"Like Some Billowing Crazy Quilt"

Chadds Ford Hills by N. C. Wyeth

I posted this painting first in 2010, noting that it was by N. C. Wyeth "of his beloved Chadd Ford Hills, for which I have no words at all."

But N. C. Wyeth had words, which he put down in a letter written on July 19, 1907, about Chadds Ford:

"From the hill...the country rolls back like some great billowing crazy quilt: patches of tender green corn interspersed with squares of ripe yellow wheat and the rich succulent greens of the woods. Great voluminous clouds boil up from hot, quivering horizons, blossoming in great bunches of ominous rain clouds."

N. C. Wyeth's letters are filled with beautiful passages like this. He was a great writer with the gift and willingness to lyrically pay homage to the people and land he loved. Note the gorgeous shimmering blue of the Brandywine River in the lower-center. 

Art Lessons: Wyeth to Wyeth

Anthony Adverse as a Boy, by N. C. Wyeth (1882-1945), with his son Andrew as the model

"My father was a terrific technician. He could take any medium and make the most of it. Once I was making a watercolor of some trees. I had made a very careful drawing and I was just filling in the lines. He came along and looked at it and said, 'Andy you've got to free yourself.' Then he took a brush and filled it with paint and made this sweeping brushstroke. I learned more then from a few minutes of watching what he did than I've ever learned since."

        Andrew Wyeth, as quoted in "Wyeth's World,"
        by Henry Adams, Smithsonian Magazine, June 2006

The Road to Friendship by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), 1941

"Close to the holidays, my father painted by 4x5-inch Christmas cards. We'd stretch out in front of the  fireplace with the watercolors. He'd work in quick washes, not starting anyplace in particular. It was like whoosh, and out of that would come a leaf or an animal. His technique taught me to embrace accidents."

Jamie Wyeth, as quoted in the Wall Street Journal, August 13, 2014

Christmas card, 1954, by Andrew Wyeth

                                                   The Sea Watched by Jamie Wyeth (1946-), 2009

Of course, that's only part of the story.  

Exploring: Art or Illustration?

Groundhog Day by Andrew Wyeth, 1959

Andrew Wyeth was on the outs with the New York art world through most of his career and at the point of his death in 2009. As related in the 2014 book Rethinking Andrew Wyeth, edited by David Cateforis, Wyeth came under harsh attack for being a mere illustrator, rather than a serious painter. The opening chapter of the book cites art critic Jay Jacobs, who wrote in Art in America that Wyeth primarily used “not pictorial but literary” devices. He cited Groundhog Day, in which “a knife, plate and cup await the arrival of some unseen personage.” He declared that Wyeth has a “linear and literary style” and castigated his vocabulary as that of “commercial illustration, not serious painting.” Another critic, Eugene M. Leake, president of the Maryland Institute College of Art, found Wyeth’s portraits to be “characters in a friendly novel or … sentimental illustrations in an attic album.” 

It is not known if the insult of “illustrator” would have been used if Andrew Wyeth’s father had not been Newell Convers Wyeth, one of America's most famous illustrators and if it were not also known that the only formal art training Andrew Wyeth received was from this man.

Nevertheless, these critics raise an interesting question: what is art and what is mere illustration?

No one felt this dichotomy more keenly than N. C. Wyeth himself. The elder Wyeth was always seeking to find the money that would enable him to paint for art's sake, but his responsibilities tied him to his lucrative art for books, magazines, and commissions. 

In a painful letter written on July 16, 1911, the elder Wyeth derided his work: “The fact is that in every case we have been more or less journalists—news reporters—taught to grasp the unique, the obviously picturesque, the essentially dramatic, sifting out here and there striking and novel situations, queer and tragic events. We were taught to shut our eyes to the simple and glorious beauties about us, to seek the strange and unusual. My Oh! My!! What a distant call to the true realms of painting! The eternal sunlight is discarded for plunging bronco-busters; the glint of the brooks is passed by for raring and tearing automobiles; the wind in the trees gives way to the driving airship! To conclude, we were taught essentially the art of journalism, to be rendered in the manner of painting….”

N. C. Wyeth struggled with this frustration all of his painting life til his tragic death at the age of 63. He was a meticulous illustrator who thoroughly researched all the details of the period he was portraying in a book, traveling to libraries and museums to render dress, weapons, and ships with precise accuracy. 

And yet. In an earlier letter (March 10, 1910), he explains his commitment to imbue any illustration with the spirit of art:

“And out of doors it is so beautiful!  It’s a pity to pry into ancient graves and let their sinister secrets blind one to the pure, wholesome beauty that lies about us. And still, if these pictures I am to paint were to be done as they should be, that very spirit which lies about us in such profusion should be their main interest and soul—they should not be historical, damn the word, but should symbolize humanity and the world, allowing the details to sift in as only ordinary and commonplace garb, to designate the season of man’s development even as the changes in the trees denote the development of Nature’s seasons.

“My solitary interest (I mean my soul interest) is in trying to do just this. If I fail in this particular—I fail altogether. If I succeed I will feel a better illustrator for it.”

In this I believe Wyeth succeeded and this is the reason why he remains a beloved illustrator today. Here are two examples of his spirit of painting in his illustrations. 

From The Black Arrow, by N. C. Wyeth. It is not just actions of the two men, but the monumental tree and the snow that makes this picture greater than the scene it depicts. 

From Kidnapped by N. C. Wyeth. 

His illustrations bring to the reader a new apprehension of what is at stake, because the particular experience has been universalized such that we recognize in it our own deepest struggles. 

And yet, N. C. Wyeth himself went into a deep depression upon reading a biography of his favorite painter, Rembrandt van Rijn, because it made him feel so sharply his own inadequacies as an artist.  Of course, if we were to apply the criteria of those who scorned Andrew Wyeth as an illustrator, we would have to throw out most of Rembrandt’s body of work. In fact, entire museums filled with what is reverenced today as great art would have to be tossed out as mere illustration. To indicate just a few:

The Return of the Prodigal Son by Rembrandt van Rijn, 1669. This post traced how Rembrandt worked through earlier versions of the Prodigal Son story to arrive at this painting, whose subject is the unseen: mercy itself. 

Portinari Altarpiece by Hugo van der Goes, 1475, which exquisitely captures the miracle and the humility of the birth of Christ. 

The Incredulity of Saint Thomas by Caravaggio, 1601. It is hard to resist the beauty of this painting. 

Creation of Adam by Michelangelo, 1511. I never met anyone of any religious or non-religious background who was not awed by seeing the Sistine Chapel. 

These four paintings all depict scenes from well-known stories. What makes them great art?  What do you think?

Fine Arts Friday: It's the Bowl

I Say Goodbye to Mother and the Cove or Jim Hawkins Leaves Home,  from Treasure Island illustrated by N. C. Wyeth, 1907

When I saw this painting by N. C. Wyeth in the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, I looked at it for a long time. We see in the center foreground the young Jim Hawkins carrying his small bag of clothes and setting out, just at the point that he has overcome his hesitancy over his mother's tears and now, more determined than fearful, is ready to step away from his home into the big world to find he knows not what.

Jim stands in the forefront of the painting, his body in strong relief against a shaft of light slanting across the house he is leaving. His mother is behind him facing toward the house, her head in her apron as she weeps. When will she hear from again? When or will she ever see him again?

The composition shows N. C. Wyeth's years of training under the illustrator Howard Pyle, as all the elements on the right side of the painting lead our eyes to the path Jim is now set upon. His mother stands against the brighter side of the house and the sky--separate from the darker shades in which her boy now steps.

But what transfixed me was the bowl. Why did Wyeth put the bowl in the window? It sits in alignment with both Mrs. Hawkins' buried head and Jim's face. It seems to symbolize the tie between them.  Perhaps more than any other object, crockery can be imbued with memories and meaning. "This was my father's cup."  "My mother always used this bowl in the morning." The bowl seems like a small detail, but when I imagine the painting without it, I find that the emotional impact is diminished.

N. C. Wyeth believed an artist has to pour his entire self into a subject to paint it. Only one year before he completed Jim Hawkins Leaving Home, he had started his own home after marrying Miss  Caroline Bockius of Wilmington, Delaware. In 1908 he bought land in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, with the proceeds from his Treasure Island illustrations and built his brick house for his young family. He wrote his mother in 1911, "How I look forward to our life in this snug little house.... Home spirit is the most religious thing I possess." And in another letter, as in 1905, he writes of how a box in which his mother had mailed a cake to him had made him homesick, as "it reeked of odors that told inexhaustible stories."

Jim's departure was not the only time Wyeth pointedly placed crockery in a work. In Mowing, he paints a young girl taking water out to a mower. The beautiful pitcher she holds glistens in the sunshine like a jewel. We can contrast this pitcher with the wooden bucket in Winslow Homer's painting of a similar scene (see below). It seems more appropriate to take water out to the fields in a bucket than in good dishware, so we can only guess that the pitcher had significance for N. C. Wyeth. In both Jim Hawkins Leaving Home and Mowing, the kitchen objects lend a grace note of "home" to the image.

Mowing by N. C. Wyeth, 1911

Temperance Meeting (Noontime) by Winslow Homer, 1874. 

The N. C. Wyeth Family Home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania

Home of N.C. Wyeth and His Family

The body of work that N.C. Wyeth left us shows that he was primarily an illustrator. No matter his status as a painter, one thing is certain: he and his wife Carolyn raised five creative children. Three became painters--one of them, Andrew, becoming a major artistic presence in the second half of the 20th century; one is a notable composer (Ann), and one became an inventor (Nathaniel).

So it is with great interest that I toured the family house of N. C. Wyeth as part of a visit to the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford. The home is situated on a hill not far from the museum. Further up the hill is the beautiful large studio that N. C. Wyeth built for himself. The Wyeth spread is near Route 1 across from the Brandywine Battlefield, where George Washington was defeated by the British General William Howe on September 11, 1777. and where the Marquis de Lafayette was wounded.

N. C. Wyeth had attended art school in the summer in Chadds Ford, studying under the Delaware illustrator Howard Pyle. At that time, N. C. Wyeth reported to his mother the happy scene of Pyle, his wife, and five children all picnicking under a tree outside their summer home. It would seem that N. C. Wyeth set out to re-create this vision, and family life and parenting became a major preoccupation of his life. 

The N. C. Wyeth Family (left to right): Nathaniel, Henrietta, Ann sitting on her mother's lap, Carolyn, and N. C. Wyeth with Andrew. 

Wyeth bought the land and built the house with the money he earned from his illustrations for Treasure Island. It was no McMansion. The house standing there now includes a later addition, that turned the former kitchen into a dining room, and added a pantry and new kitchen. Even with the addition, the N. C. Wyeth home must have been a snug fit for seven active people. I figure the children must have been tossed outside to play and that N. C. Wyeth's studio--filled with costumes, paints, pastels, books, and all manner of fascinating things--must have been a spillover playroom. 

The living room was the biggest room in the house, and it did not take any stretch of the imagination to envision the entire family gathered in this room after dinner, reading, talking, playing music, drawing, doing homework, and sewing (Mrs. Wyeth). 

Living room in the N. C. Wyeth home with a bust of Beethoven in the window and a large bookcase. 

The Big Room by Andrew Wyeth, 1948--three years after his father's untimely death. The younger Wyeth has stripped the room of comfort and coziness  and instead focused on the light pouring into it. 

The living room from the other side. 

               The dining room is small, and benches supplied the seating on either side of the table. 

The pantry with some of the Wyeth crockery, of which more on Friday. 

Painting by N. C. Wyeth of his wife in the kitchen. The painting is on the middle shelf to the right in the pantry above. 

A child's bedroom. All the bedrooms were like this. A bed, perhaps a four-poster, with a white chenille bedspread, a chair, a bookcase full of books, a bureau. 

After the adult children left, Mrs. Carolyn Wyeth continued to live in the house until her death in  1973. Then daughter Carolyn lived there, painting and giving art lessons.  After she died in 1994, the house was given to the Brandywine River Museum of Art and is now open for tours. 

Fine Arts Friday: Winter Is for Wyeth 2

Crows in Winter by N. C. Wyeth, 1941

N. C. Wyeth painted Crows in Winter as part of a set of four seasonal paintings for MetLife, painted in oil. The other three are Canada Geese in Spring, Herons in Summer, and Mallards in Autumn. Of the four, however, Crows in Winter stands out for its almost Japanese woodcut quality. N. C. Wyeth created this effect in the painting, as can be seen from his sketch, which presents a less flat character.

In the sketch, Wyeth has drawn the differentiation in  the crow's bodies and wings as they fly, and the valley below and the ice in the trees are shaded. In the painting, though, perhaps the stark juxtaposition of the crows against the sky led him to leave any differentiation behind in the sketch and take advantage of this starkness to make the painting more dramatic, and the crows look almost like black paper cutouts against the sky. For the most part, the snow on the pine tree on the right gets the same treatment, losing all shading the closer it gets to the crows. Against the flatness of the crows and the snow and the smoothing out of the snow in the valley below,  the branches of the tree on the lower left look like a fragile fan spread out by an unseen hand. The snow and crows also stand out against the mushroom-nuanced sky. The total effect is an arresting painting. Its simplicity and color denote cold and winter; the sky may well bring more snow.

The sketch was produced in 1940, so it is likely that the painting was created before the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, but it is hard not to see in the head-on view of the flock of crows an acknowledgement of the ominous war that was already engulfing Asia and Europe and that was surely on everyone's mind.

At the age of 59, N.C. Wyeth was struggling to be a painter rather than an illustrator, and numbers of his paintings at this time show a totally new style, as he borrows from here or there, but the style remains undeveloped in subsequent paintings. In this case, the elder Wyeth has created a work that calls to mind Mary Cassatt's simplifying style in some of her works in homage to Japanese woodblocks. Crows in Winter seems to be another, short-lived experiment by Wyeth. Unfortunately, he died only four years later in an accident, and we do not know where ultimately his painterly seeking might have led him. Although his later work Nightfall (1945) is well loved, including by me, I believe that his finest paintings (that are not illustrations) are his stilllifes. But that's for another Friday.

Fine Arts Friday: Winter Is for Wyeth

Dead of Winter by Andrew Wyeth

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape, the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show," Andrew Wyeth said, about why so few of his landscapes are summer or spring scenes. He spent the winter months in Chadds Ford, in southern Pennsylvania, an area of moderate winter temperatures and snow, just enough snow to cover the ground but not enough to cover everything, as the painting shows. 

Dead of winter is a scene that any of us who have tramped around fields or the outskirts of towns in the winter might see. It is a commonplace scene that brings to mind nothing of note in the passing of it. Yet, such is the power of art that Wyeth nearly takes our breath away with the detailed beauty of this painting--the graceful and fragile grasses on the lower left, the scraggy bark of the tree, the green on its branches, the sturdy stalks of grasses and weeds. 

Here we see the Wyeth method at work, whose purpose was not to capture an objective reality but to capture his own excitement and love of the object he was painting. I don't know the history of this particular painting in pre-studies, but Wyeth rarely painted only what he saw or did so only in fast, on-the-scene watercolors. This painting displays lavish attention to detail painted in the studio. 

The tree stands isolated from the pine grove on the hill behind it.  And as Wyeth references, we know that this scene--captured on canvas--does not last forever in nature; soon the snow will melt, the ground will loosen up, and the buried plants will start to stir. 

Dead of Winter is a nature scene, but its composition and tender rendering stir up our soul. We can see ourselves in it, not as walking next to it but our life on an emotional continuum with it.  

Andrew Wyeth--great painter, great poet.    

Fine Arts Friday: The Chadds Ford Wyeths

Chadds Ford Hills, Newell Convers Wyeth

N.C. Wyeth was the father of Andrew Wyeth and grandfather of Jamie Wyeth. His son's work is noted for its muted palette, while N.C. Wyeth's paintings radiate color and atmospheric effect. If you have the opportunity, visit the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, home to many paintings by all the Wyeths.

At the museum, which I visited last year, the effects upon me of the works of N. C. Wyeth and his son were quite different. Many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings I found deeply moving, especially those with the layers of dry tempera rising from the surface of the canvas. The experience is almost religious; despite the apparent simplicity of his subject, its essence is drawn out through the paint signifying a whole world to us, each leaf seeming to drip with the cosmic significance of creation.

N.C. Wyeth's paintings awe in a different way--their human poignancy and the placement and gestures of the figures in his paintings, many of them used as illustrations, draw us into their world. We are caught up in the action; we are dying to know what happens next. The fulsomeness and beauty of the drama, surroundings, and coloration prompt in us a near reverential appreciation of both the fragility and the richness of life.

So in praise of the fall and the Wyeths, here is a painting by N.C. Wyeth of his beloved Chadd Ford Hills, for which I have no words at all.

The Art of Subtraction

The Writing Chair by Andrew Wyeth.

My mother was an artist of subtraction. When she died, I was astounded to find that there really wasn't any junk in the entire house. There were mementos, important papers, and various objects, and many photographs of loved ones on display and in boxes, but nothing superfluous, no redundancy. This art of restraint was part of her aesthetic and showed itself in her interior decorating, which was based on the artful arrangement of high-quality objects and furniture--nothing was added, except always a touch of whimsy or the unexpected.

I am far more greedy, and although I do not like clutter, am far more prone to compromising to add in objects I have affection for. I love paintings and heaven for me might be looking at all my favorite paintings all at once--not something I can achieve in my living room. But at this point in time I feel a need for a more streamlined and bare essential existence, wanting to know exactly what object is there and what its purpose is, and not have to think about anything extraneous. Note here that I, as opposed to so many, have the luxury of discarding.


Master Bedroom by Andrew Wyeth.

This is not to say that I embrace the streamlined aesthetic of modernity. Given the right use of color, this aesthetic might be visually appealing in a magazine, but I would never want to live there. The trick seems to be striking the balance between a simplified aesthetic and a coziness that is home.

This is probably why at this point in time I feel so drawn to the art of Andrew Wyeth, a master of the art of subtraction. His interiors seem to be stripped to the barest essentials of the soul. Nothing is extraneous. Every object is drenched in meaning and speaks of a history, a history we could never put in words but we can feel the weight of it. This is the beauty of his art: subtraction, and light.


Ship's Clock by Andrew Wyeth.

On the Passing of Andrew Wyeth

Painter Andrew Wyeth died January 16 in his sleep in his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, at the age of 91. I remember in the early 1960s, when Wyeth's painting came to the fore and my mother hung four of them in our living room. We lived near Chadds Ford and were very proud of him as a painter for that reason alone. Newspaper accounts of his life since his death two days ago indicate that he was derided by the reigning New York art world for his attachment to realism, whereas they reveled in iconoclasm or in iconoclastic iconism (Warhol et al.). Wyeth worked primarily in watercolor and tempera, and his paintings often seem to have a quality of layering of light.


His was a painting of subtraction. Stating that his thought was abstract, Wyeth told an interviewer, "I've often said, 'If I was really good, I could have done the field in Christina's World without her in there.' The less you have in a subject, the better the picture is, really." I think that practice of subtraction is also what makes it difficult to imagine the framing of Wyeth's paintings. Framing and matting would seem to intrude on the contemplative mood of most of his painting with a rude tap on the shoulder.


For the Washington Post, Henry Allen and Bart Barnes wrote yesterday:

In a review of a 1996 show, one of us asked: "Why does the railing curve away from us while the floorboards of the deck proceed straight as a ruler? And how can a white chair in shadow be as white as a white rail in sunlight?"
But more important, Wyeth was loved, admired, defended and respected by countless Americans not because of either his realism or his abstraction but because of the way he made us feel.
He didn't take us back to Eden, in the manner of Renaissance pastoralists, he took us back to the moment of exile from Eden, the excruciating poignancy of the moment mankind came to know death. The fruits of Paradise are gone, the trees are bare ruined choirs, the sedge has withered from the lake and no birds sing as Shakespeare and Keats wrote in evoking the same feelings.
For all his realism, the America he shows is dead and gone, "lost and by the wind grieved," as Thomas Wolfe put it.


Wyeth's audience finds its identity in Britain and a lost agrarian past. Modernists find it in cities and the Continent. He appeals to the sort of people who take pride in loss, as shown in his paintings where snow blows over the dead land with the glamour of some kind of aftermath. He pairs grief with a celebration of innocence.
Wyeth makes us the main character in any painting, in part because there are so few people in his work. By contrast, Norman Rockwell, another realist lambasted by critics, makes us spectators at a gala show. Rockwell celebrates the community; Wyeth puts the individual at center stage, even when that individual is only an unseen viewer, which is to say us, alone as our Puritan ancestors brooding on their souls.
We admire and crave the tradition and continuity that the whole Wyeth family has shown in its works and lives. But Andrew Wyeth forces us to go back and back to loss, however painful, in the manner of tongues seeking a sore tooth. He shares a sense of tragedy that is especially common among old English stock like himself. People are grateful to him for reassuring them that their nostalgias, fantasies and would-be realities are real.
Has anyone done what he did, and done it better?

I find this to be a kind of literalist approach to Wyeth's painting, as if the subject of a poem were the words. The power of Wyeth's work, which was embraced by the American people, is its poetry, which lifts us out of time to something more mysterious and eternal.

Wyeth's Pilgrims

See Life at Willow Manor for a reminder about N.C. Wyeth's Pilgrims. See Encore Editions for more paintings by this fascinating painter-illustrator and father of Andrew, grandfather of Jamie.