Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)
Brandywine Museum of Art, 1 Hoffman’s Mill Road, Chadds Ford, PA 19317
610-388-2700
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ABOUT
A converted schoolhouse, this is the primary studio of Andrew Wyeth, in continual use from 1940 until shortly before the artist’s death in January, 2009. The studio is the center of Wyeth’s Pennsylvania world, the rich microcosm that inspired and nourished his art.
SPECIAL RESOURCES
“Art, to me is seeing. I think you have got to use your eyes as well as your emotion, and one without the other just doesn’t work. That’s my art.”
— Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009)
Andrew Wyeth is recognized as one of the most important American artists of the twentieth century. For more than seven decades he painted the regions of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he was born, and mid-coast Maine, where he spent his summers.
At age fifteen he began artistic training under his father, artist N.C. Wyeth. His career as a watercolorist was launched in 1937, when his first one-man show at Macbeth Gallery in New York drew critical acclaim. Andrew Wyeth also became a master of egg tempera, an ancient method that blends dry pigments with egg yolk and distilled water. In contrast to watercolor’s spontaneity and translucency, tempera is a time-consuming process that yields opaque and richly varied surfaces.
An astute observer who freely manipulated his subjects, transforming them in order to evoke memories, ideas, and emotions, Wyeth created mysterious undercurrents in his landscapes, interiors, and portraits.
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In 1940, the young Andrew Wyeth and his new wife Betsy moved into a converted schoolhouse, just down the lane from where Andrew had grown up. The Wyeths would live – and Andrew would work – in this building for the next twenty years. In the early 1960s, the Wyeths acquired a new home, but the old schoolhouse remained Wyeth’s major Pennsylvania studio where he painted for another five decades.
The schoolhouse had already been used by Wyeth’s sister, Henriette, and brother-in-law Peter Hurd, as both studio and home. Wyeth’s sons, Jamie and Nicholas, remember a life integrated with art—visiting their father in the studio room, or having guests come to look at newly completed paintings that Andrew often hung in the kitchen. While Wyeth ventured out to select and sketch various motifs in the countryside, his major temperas were always painted in the studio.
The painting studio is presented almost as it appeared shortly before Wyeth’s death. Watercolor and tempera material give visitors a sense of the artist’s craft. The building still houses Wyeth’s art library and his extensive collections of military miniatures, costumes, and paintings by Howard Pyle. The high-ceilinged, sparsely-furnished former schoolrooms reflect Wyeth’s austere aesthetic and earth-toned palette. The tall, paned windows create details on the landscape that speak to the way Wyeth constructed some of his compositions; they also infuse the interior spaces with natural light that was so important to the artist.
Following Andrew Wyeth‘s death in 2009, Betsy donated the property to the Brandywine Museum of Art. During Wyeth’s lifetime, the studio was a very personal space, and the artist protected the privacy he felt necessary to his work. The artist posted a sign on the door that says: “I am working so please do not disturb.” Although the sign remains, we are now welcome to visit this very special place.
