Andrew Wyeth

DUE TO MR. WYETHS RECENT PASSING, (RIP JANUARY 16, 2009) ALL SALES OF HIS WORKS WILL BE HALTED TILL FURTHER NOTICE!!!

         U.S. watercolourist and worker in tempera noted primarily for painting in a realistic manner the old buildings, the fields and hills, and the people of his private world. Wyeth's father, N.C. Wyeth, was a well-known illustrator who had studied under Howard Pyle and who served as his son's only teacher.

       Andrew Wyeth, born July 12, 1917, Chadds Ford, Pa., U.S, presented his first one-man show in New York City in 1937. The subject matter of Wyeth's pictures comes almost entirely from two localities, the Brandywine Valley around Chadds Ford and the area near his summer home in Cushing, Maine. Wyeth uses a restricted palette mostly of earth colours but capable of hundreds of muted harmonies. His technique is precise and detailed, yet he lifts his paintings above photographic naturalism with an unreal, visionary quality. His best known painting, "Christina's World" (1948; Museum of Modern Art, New York City), exemplifies his mastery of unusual angles of perspective and his use of light to pinpoint time

        Andrew Wyeth’s ability to create unmistakably realistic images set to a fictional tone both impressed and enraged critics. During his sixty-year career, his work gradually began an evolution from realism to surrealistic expressionism to a combination of both. This is the primary reason for the feelings of rage held by these critics. They felt if he were to be taken seriously as an artist and build a career based on merit, he should not be working in such a light medium.. 

        Wyeth was the first painter to receive the Presidential Freedom Award (1963) conferred by U.S. Pres. John F. Kennedy. In 1977 he became the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts, and in the next year he became an honorary member of the Soviet Academy of the Arts. In 1980 he became the first living American artist to be elected to Britain's Royal Academy. His exhibition at the Whitney Museum in New York City in 1967 established a new attendance record for that institution.

        Wyeth's technical resources are remarkable, but more important are his insight into the accretions of living that have left their mark on the people he paints and his ability to convey a sense of generations of living in his paintings of old houses and their interiors. Wyeth, now eighty-three years of age, still paints all day everyday. He still speaks during dedications, such as the celebration of his eightieth birthday, and gives interviews. His life, full of creation and success, is and inspiration to both seasoned artists and those in training.  It is not difficult to find a museum or gallery somewhere featuring his or his family’s work, find a book containing their pieces or an article teaching about their history

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