Wyeth Paintings Are Forever
STORY PUBLISHED: JULY 12, 2017 by Antiques and the Arts Weekly
To commemorate the centennial of Andrew Wyeth’s birth, a dozen of the artist’s paintings will have an enduring legacy as the United States Postal Service is featuring them on a sheet of Forever stamps. A first-day-of-issue dedication ceremony took place July 12 (Wyeth’s birthday) at the Brandywine River Museum and his son, painter Jamie Wyeth, helped dedicate the stamps.
“My father, a prolific letter writer, would indeed be proud that a selection of his paintings now appears on US postage stamps,” said Jamie Wyeth. “He would have relished using them!”
The pane of stamps celebrates Andrew Wyeth, whose realistic style defied artistic trends. He created haunting and enigmatic paintings based largely on people and places in his life, a body of work that continues to resist easy or comfortable interpretation.
The stamps features a detail from the following paintings: “Wind from the Sea,” 1947; “Big Room,” 1988; “Christina’s World,” 1948; “Alvaro and Christina,” 1968; “Frostbitten,” 1962; “Sailor’s Valentine,” 1985; “Soaring,” 1942–1950; “North Light,” 1984; “Spring Fed,” 1967; “The Carry,” 2003; “Young Bull,” 1960; and “My Studio,” 1974. The selvage, or area outside of the stamp images, shows a photograph of Wyeth from the 1930s. Art director Derry Noyes of Washington, DC, designed the pane.
The Brandywine River Museum of Art owns and operates the studio of Andrew Wyeth as well as the home and studio of his father N. C. Wyeth. Both sites are members of the Historic Artists’ Homes and Studios network. For more information about these limited-edition stamps Click here.
