By Richard L. Gaw
Staff Writer

“As early as ten I began to paint Maine. I painted around the islands and did my first pen drawings and then I went on to watercolor.” – Andrew Wyeth

While it is practically the birthright of every Chadds Ford resident to proudly claim him exclusively as their own, Andrew Wyeth’s artistic life was the beneficiary of two distinctive regions -- a “Here and There” dichotomy of dissimilar influences that drew him deep into his canvases and made him one of the most well-known American artists of the 20th Century.

Until his death in 2009, Wyeth’s life was divided evenly – six months here and six months there, a life of dueling muses between Chadds Ford and the immediate surroundings near Port Clyde, Maine, where he first spent summers as a child creating pen drawings and watercolor paintings of the rocky shores. As he got older and his prominence as an artist grew, Wyeth, his wife Betsy and their family would continue to make the nearly ten-hour drive from Chadds Ford to Maine, where Betsy would choreograph the distinct locations where her husband would paint and give titles to his work like “House on Teels Island,” “Maine Door” and “New Moon Study.” 

Now, the temperate climate of Muscongus Bay, the salt air at Broad Cove and the ocean crashing against the rocks at Allen Island are part of Up East: Andrew Wyeth in Maine, a new exhibition at the Brandywine Museum of Art that will run through Feb. 23, 2025. Up East brings to Chadds Ford for the first time a broad overview of the key sites of Wyeth’s Maine work, including two temperas and 32 watercolors, many of which have never been exhibited before. The exhibit captures the depth of Wyeth’s vision beyond the familiar landscapes and portraits of life in Chadds Ford; instead of the muted yellows, golds and forlorn images of southeastern Pennsylvania, audiences are introduced to an environment of granite, weathered pines and the people who inhabited the coastal communities, many of whom Wyeth got to know. 

“There is this fundamental, meditative and recursive discipline to his practice – returning time and again to the same well of inspiration and coming to know the people of these places deeply,” said Will Coleman, Ph.D., the Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director of the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Brandywine Museum of Art. “It is an unexpected pattern consistent in both Chadds Ford and in Maine of talking himself into the lives of families and literally getting the keys to their houses so he can come and go as he pleased.

“This exhibition asks how it was different and what did he find in that other pole that is different than what he found here. Wyeth once said that there is a deep foundation of earth between your feet in Chadds Ford in the sense of a long human history, and in Maine, there is hard granite coast -- this thin, skeletal layer of surface on top of this harsh and unyielding world of the Gulf of Maine and the people who have been shaped by this environment.

Coleman said that those who attend the exhibition anticipating seeing the picture-postcard images of the coast of Maine – clear blue skies and endless lighthouses and lush and rich blues and greens– may be surprised to see something quite different in hue and composition – a conscious narrow entrenchment of colors that defines Wyeth’s works. 

“I am struck by how he focuses on an unglamorous and hard-working portion of that coast,” he said. “He is so close but yet so far from fancy Camden and Bar Harbor and all these other options that have been calling out to artists for centuries. He focuses instead on an impoverished pair of peninsulas and the people who eked out a living from that tough environment. There is a sense of identification with the people of the place – that long-term immersive practice of becoming one of the people who understand the slower rhythms of the natural world.

“He does not just extract from it pleasant and soothing tourist paintings but rather, something harder.”

A five-mile radius of focus

For an artist whose fame reached worldwide status, the circumference of Wyeth’s artistic focus was ironically confined to Chadds Ford in the fall and winter and Maine in the spring and summer, and while the contours and colors of the exhibit illustrate the vast differences between the two places, it also confirms that the artist was devoted to mastering a consistent subject matter, person by person, contour by contour. 

“It’s a really unusual creative legacy – an artist who is loved all around the world with major collections of his work in museums all over this country who had the success in his lifetime to travel anywhere and paint anything but chose to ruthlessly focus on going deep on these two very narrowly circumscribed places,” Coleman said. “We have measured it out and it’s something like a five-mile radius around Chadds Ford and a five-mile radius around Port Clyde, an almost exact and event split of the areas. It was where he chose to know a small number of subjects deeply instead of spreading himself thin over a wider area.”

For several decades of Wyeth’s artistic life in Maine, he often painted, while Betsy was heavily involved in transporting old buildings and designing new ones that became creative living spaces for visitors, a working studio for her husband and a gallery where three generations of Wyeth art – N.C., Andrew and Jamie – were displayed. The islands, which are still used seasonally by local fishermen and their families, were eventually purchased by Betsy and over the years, she designed landscapes by clearing fields, digging ponds and installing roads, and rebuilding a working commercial dock.

“There is certainly a larger, really fascinating and complicated creative partnership at work here, where Betsy is not just cleaning debris from the water’s edge, but designing whole and immersive environments for her husband to paint,” said Coleman, who referred to Betsy as a “creative force” behind her husband’s art. “In her own words, she said, ‘If Andy paints it once it will have been worth it.” She was thinking about shaping land and shaping buildings explicitly for the artist’s eye.

“We can’t forget that Betsy Wyeth was a pre-condition for Andrew Wyeth’s most important works of art.”

“When we think of Wyeth, we think of “Christina’s World,” and the Olson house, the enigmatic building at the back of the painting. She was he one who introduced Andrew to the Olson family. She was the one who brought him there to see the discomfiting poverty in which the Olsons lived, and he rose to it with this superpower of empathy to earn their trust and become a part of the lives of the people they knew.”

A conversation with the audience

As with every exhibition at the Brandywine Museum of Art, Up East: Andrew Wyeth in Maine is a conversation the museum has with the supporters and visitors who will see the paintings for themselves. 

“The museum is a place that is especially strong in art in relation to the natural world, and a place that has a broad and fascinating collection of art that focuses with particular strength in the creative legacy of our region and has the duty to keep doing research into that story,” Coleman said. “Our Wyeth exhibit is just one more layer of that continuing dialogue, seeing how the art that began her in Chadds Ford, reached out to Maine and ultimately, to the entire world.

“We’re seeing an artist who was sensitive to a changing ecosystem around him,” Coleman added. “We’re seeing an original creative force, not someone who was born in the wrong century and an artist of another time, but a fully modern artist who found his own lane and in this remarkable rootedness, came up with a legacy truly of his own.”

Up East: Andrew Wyeth in Maine runs at the Brandywine Museum of Art through February 23, 2025. All the works in this exhibition are by Andrew Wyeth and are drawn from the collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, the support of which has made this exhibition possible.

To learn more about the exhibit and for hours, visit www.brandywine.org.

To contact Staff Writer Richard L. Gaw, email [email protected].