A few months later, Christina’s World was hanging in the prestigious Museum of Modern Art, vaulting Wyeth overnight to instant celebrity and forever linking him to the crippled girl’s yearning figure in the hay field.
Andrew Wyeth’s beautifully disturbing masterpiece is one link in an artistic lineage that stretches back to his father, N.C., and continues on through his son, Jamie. All three men based themselves in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and in midcoast Maine, exploring with great intimacy these two worlds that inspired their artwork
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“The three Wyeth generations defy categories,” says Lora Urbanelli, director of the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, which includes the Wyeth Center, a research/exhibition space dedicated to the family’s Maine-related paintings and archives. “N.C.’s illustrations fit right into his times, the romance and drama of the turn of the century,” Urbanelli says. “Andrew continues to confound the critics, although it’s obvious he’s destined to be placed with the very best of American artists. Where Andrew tends to face inward, Jamie is perhaps more like his grandfather in responding to contemporary issues and being more connected to his
generation.”
N.C. Wyeth
Larger than Life
When patriarch Newell Convers Wyeth—known as N.C.—brought his growing clan to Port Clyde, Maine, every summer beginning in the 1920s, he started a family tradition that continues today. N.C. (1882–1945) was a brilliant illustrator of such children’s classics as Treasure Island, Robin Hood, Kidnapped, and Robinson Crusoe. His dramatic images of swashbuckling pirates, maidens in distress, Indians, and princes fed the imaginations of generations of children, including his own. A larger-than-life figure as dramatic as his paintings, N.C. raised his family in the idyllic farm country of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, creating a home life that was a monument to his sweeping philosophies. N.C. and wife Carol raised their five creative children in a world steeped in art, music, theatrical drama, and elaborate holiday rituals. Andrew told his biographer, Richard Meryman, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, “Although we were raised simply, we were raised to be little geniuses.”
Though N.C. enjoyed financial success and a considerable reputation from his illustration work, he increasingly longed for the freedom to express his deep love of nature away from the pressures of
assignment deadlines. Maine beckoned with its unique light and constant drama of the sea.
In 1930, N.C. was able to move the family to a sea captain’s house in Port Clyde, a home he’d purchased 10 years before and renovated. Wyeth named the summer home “Eight Bells” in tribute to Winslow Homer’s famous Maine painting of two fishermen in slickers.
“Port Clyde was a summer refuge [for N.C.] to paint outdoors and follow his muse,” says Helen Fisher, curatorof exhibitions at the Farnsworth. N.C. Wyeth clearly wanted to be recognized as a fine artist, not just an illustrator. During those Maine summers, he sketched and painted on the grounds of “Eight Bells,” at the wharf in Port Clyde, and along the rocky shores.
“Port Clyde is meaning a great deal to me,” he wrote in a 1925 letter to friend and fellow artist Sidney Chase. “As soon as I can outgrow the picturesqueness of appeal of the country and its inhabitants, it may be that I can someday strike at something bigger in the painting of it.” This intense desire to look beyond the merely scenic to capture the essence of things is one of N.C.’s greatest legacies.
Some think N.C.’s noncommercial work—the landscapes of Maine and other favorite subjects—was the best expression of his considerable talents. Others, like son Andrew, think his true genius lies in the illustrations infused with adventurous action and romance. The Wyeth Center has numerous examples of both types of N.C. Wyeth’s work.
Andrew Wyeth
The Sea Within
Andrew Wyeth, born in 1917, was the youngest of Newell Convers Wyeth’s five children, three of whom became artists. Andrew was a sensitive and sickly child, tutored at home, often left to himself to roam the countryside of Chadds Ford and Port Clyde. In Meryman’s book A Secret Life, Andrew described his childhood as living on the fringes of the high-powered family, but he also became an acute observer of human nature and the natural world. Drawing and painting became an obsession, partly as a buffer against the world. Andrew later said his models were all outsiders like himself.
When Andrew was 15, N.C. took him into his studio and became his only art teacher. Their relationship was complex. N.C. was father, teacher, mentor, and hero, but his towering moods and need to control overwhelmed Andrew, who retreated into secrecy. Another way Andrew learned to avoid confrontation was to use his considerable charm and roguish smile to disarm those around him. When his father died in a tragic train-crossing accident in 1945, it marked a turning point for Andrew, both personally and artistically. His art took on a deeper maturity and meaning as he strove to make sense of this profound loss.
Summers in Maine offered freedom from his sheltered life in Chadds Ford. His closest companion and partner in crime was Walter Anderson, a Port Clyde boy six years younger who later became the subject of more than 100 paintings. Anderson was a lovable rogue, a hardscrabble lobsterman who was Andrew’s guide to discovering coastal Maine. The boys spent carefree days exploring the islands around Port Clyde or simply drifting in a small boat in comfortable silence. His friend brought out Andrew’s wild side, and Wyeth’s vivid imagination cast Anderson in the role of pirate from his childhood costume dramas.
In what became a lifelong pattern for Andrew, painting and friendship were intertwined, and his relationship with Walt Anderson—like Christina Olson and many others—lasted to the end. “Walter was my connection to Maine,” Andrew told a reporter a few days after Anderson’s death in 1987. “Out of him came Christina and all the others. But Walter was not a character to me. He was my own age.”
Just as Andrew liked to imagine Walt Anderson as a modern-day pirate, his masterpiece, Christina’s World, is a haunting metaphor for his feelings about Maine. Christina Olson was a lifelong friend he respected deeply, but she also symbolized many qualities of Maine—stoicism, endurance, a family history steeped in the sea.
“The shadow of Christina’s head against a door has a ghostly quality, eerie, fateful, serious,” he told Meryman in A Secret Life, “a symbol of New England people in the past—as they really were.”
Still painting obsessively at age 89, still haunting his favorite summer spots in and around Cushing, Andrew Wyeth has spent his life mining two small universes. In knowing these places intimately, he absorbs their essences, mirroring his father’s drive to look beneath the surface of things. And the intense realism he achieves through his painstaking brushstrokes is the outward expression of deep inner meaning.
“Now, I couldn’t get any of this feeling without a very strong connection for a place,” he told Meryman. “I don’t go to Maine particularly because of the salt air or the water. In fact, I like Maine in spite of its scenery. There’s a lot of cornball in that state you have to go through . . . There’s something very basic about the country there. It has an austere quality—very exciting—the quietness, the freedom. I like it because it has an edge.”
Like his paintings, which mix rustic realism with undercurrents of strangeness and symbolism, Andrew is a person not easily fathomed. The huge crowds that attended the recent career retrospective, Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic, at the Philadelphia Museum of Art attest to his work’s enduring appeal. Complex, secretive, bawdy, and charismatic, Andrew Wyeth’s ongoing bond with Maine continues to feed his fresh, mysterious approach that has kept him at the forefront of the artistic canon, nearly 60 years after Christina’s World.
Jamie Wyeth
Splendid Isolation
It seems astounding that a third generation artist could inherit the immense talent and pure passion of the Wyeth painters before him. But Jamie Wyeth, 60, youngest son of Andrew and Betsy, has made his own indelible mark on the art world, and today is the Wyeth with the closest ties to Maine.
Jamie isn’t easy to classify as a painter. He combines the genius of his father—closely observed subjects with a sophisticated, realistic technique—and his grandfather—the dash and drama, rich colors and high emotion of N.C.’s best work—into a style completely his own. He acknowledges that Andrew is his closest friend and the painter whose work he admires the most. Their mutual respect allows them to be brutally honest with each other: “We are completely frank, as we have nothing to gain by being nice,” Jamie told interviewer Joyce Hill Steiner.
“They’re [Andrew and Jamie] so damned passionate and intense about how they go about their work,” says Rockport photographer and family friend Peter Ralston. “They’ve focused their life’s work on two tightly constricted geographical areas, and rather than going broad, they’ve gone deep, deep, deep. Andy and Jamie are acutely aware of beauty, but are equally attuned to life’s darker aspects. They’re immensely curious about human nature and want to cut directly to the truth.”
Despite the differences in their painting styles, Jamie’s early experiences paralleled his father’s. Like Andrew, he showed precocious artistic talent, and was tutored at home after sixth grade so he could devote more time to art. By age 20 he’d had his first successful one-man show. Jamie studied painting with his artist aunt Carolyn Wyeth who used N.C.’s old studio in Chadds Ford, giving him a direct line to the colorful, robust approaches of his grandfather.
In the Steiner interview, he credits his aunt for his early love of the medium of oil paint: “I suppose my real interest started in oil just because I loved the way she squeezed it out—it looked so edible, you know. When I was six or something, I would walk in and see it squirt—burnt sienna and raw umber . . .” This appreciation for sensuous textures and rich colors is a hallmark of his work.
Undistracted by the typical activities of most children, Jamie had a strong connection to the natural world and a sensitive kinship with animals. Throughout his career, he has painted hundreds of animals—sheep, chickens, pigs, and seagulls—with the same individuality and unflinching honesty as his human subjects. A showcase for his ongoing fascination with birds is the recently published book Gulls, Ravens and a Vulture: The Ornithological Paintings of James Wyeth, based on the 2005 exhibit by that name at the Farnsworth Museum.
In early adulthood, Jamie spent time in urban areas and his work began to mirror the times. He was a court artist for the Watergate trials; participated in NASA’s Eyewitness to Space program; painted portraits of world leaders and arts figures; and worked for a time in Andy Warhol’s studio, the Factory. Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Jamie has illustrated two children’s books, The Stray, written by his mother, Betsy James Wyeth, and Cabbages and Kings, by Elizabeth Seabrook.
Maine has been a central influence on Jamie’s work and is the subject of some of his most unique and powerful paintings. While still a teenager, his love of Maine’s islands led him to rugged Monhegan, 12 miles out to sea, where he bought the house of artist Rockwell Kent and began painting images of Monhegan’s people and wildlife amid the island’s precarious beauty and stark isolation.
When the so-called “affable hermit” began to feel constrained by Monhegan’s growing popularity as a tourist destination, he later moved to his present home in a lighthouse on tiny Southern Island, living for much of the year in splendid isolation. On a recent foggy afternoon from Southern Island, Jamie answered this writer’s questions in a rare phone interview. As a rule, both Andrew and Jamie prefer to let their paintings speak for themselves, but on this day the younger Wyeth was open and engaging in talking about the influences on his work.
“The familiarity with a place is a big part of it,” he says. “What’s familiar is what you record. I grew up here in Maine; it’s my home and I’m perfectly interested in the people and the animals of
the islands.
“The problem with Maine is it’s so emblematic—the lobster traps, the sunsets,” he says with an easy laugh, echoing the earlier words of his father and grandfather. “There’s that bucolic image [of Maine islands], but winters are tough. Islanders are singular people and I identify with that sense of isolation. But you can be alone and not be lonely.”
That seclusion, he’s found, allows him to disengage from the world. “In a funny sense, [island life] gives me focus. We’re so bombarded with information that physically having the parameters of an island, things get reduced to a common denominator.”
Another thing that intrigues Jamie about island life is the unique light and ever-present ocean. “Even if you’re not looking directly at it, the sea permeates everything—and you get all that reflected light.”
His work ethic is formidable and he’s said that painting is all he really wants to do. Lacking coworkers or workplace to provide outside structure, “I paint every day, that’s all I do,” he says. “You push yourself, but it’s not always inspired. Once in a while when something clicks and it is inspired—that’s the opiate of painting.”
On the island, Jamie Wyeth often paints birds—“they’re ready models”—and that day he was finishing a painting of a young girl from the mainland standing amid an assortment of whale bones (see previous page). “I feel a stronger connection with Maine right now,” he says as the interview ends. “I find I’m spending more and more time alone on the island. I do like the isolation.”
Isolation. Focus. Fascination. Connection. They all describe a century of give and take from Maine’s landscape and people to three generations of Wyeth artists. With a museum full of original works by N.C., Andrew, and Jamie Wyeth just a short drive away in Rockland, Maine art lovers have the enviable privilege of adding their own responses to the Wyeth legacy.
