N.C. Wyeth and the Brandywine River Museum

What a Chester County day!

After strolling about Longwood Gardens during the cooler morning today, we grabbed a tasty lunch at its Terrace Cafe before driving the short distance east to the Brandywine River Museum and the site of the Wyeth Farm, home to the famous painters N.C. Wyeth and his son Andrew Wyeth.

We started our visit with a tour of the N.C. Wyeth home and studio, which is where Andrew Wyeth spent the first 20 years of his life as well.  N.C. had taken art lessons as a young man from the famous illustrator Howard Pyle at Pyle's summer art school near the village of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and N.C. fell in love with the countryside.  As his career blossomed, he took the (then) fabulous sum of $2,500 he earned from illustrating Robert Louis Stevenson's "Treasure Island" to purchase 18 acres of land overlooking Chadds Ford village.  Here, he built his home:

The house was home to N.C., his wife and a gaggle of kids, who all excelled in careers of art and engineering.  When N.C. would finish an hour's work on his painting each morning, he would troop down to the house from his studio and pound on the piano in the photo below to wake the entire family for breakfast:

We toured the house, and then were taken up to the studio N.C. built, higher on the hill above his house:

N.C. was an imposing figure who, nevertheless was a kind and loving father with a tremendous energy and sense of humor.  A lifesize photo of him posed by his books in the entryway to the studio:

His most famous child, Andrew, was a painting prodigy and painted this self-portrait at age 16.  It now hangs on one of two opposing entrance doors into the main studio room --

 

 

-- while a self portrait by his daughter Carolyn, who retained use of part of the studio late into her life, hangs on the opposing door:

N.C. maintained an extensive book collection in the studio, including shelves of National Geographic magazines, all useful in his work as an illustrator of books and other materials.  Paintings of (l-r) his mother, himself and his father hang above the bookshelves:

N.C. was committed to the value of painting in natural light, with north-facing light (i.e., indirect sunlight) the most favored, and so included this huge window to provide the necessary light to do his work:

An expanded section of his studio was even larger to accommodate the murals he painted for various commissions (the painting shown was done by him for Penn Mutual Life Insurance Company, which donated it back to the Museum):

 

 

It seems N.C. Wyeths was plagued his entire career by being labelled a "mere" illustrator rather than a "painter" -- perhaps both in his own mind and in the mind of the public.  This is a shame, because his "easel paintings," as he called them to distinguish them from his illustrations, are superb.  This one, titled, "Island Funeral," is David's favorite work of his:

This corner of his studio displays two still life paintings he did, the one on the left with a notation that it was completed in three hours!

Here is a photo of N.C. in his studio with some of his work:

The studio also houses a large number of items N.C. called "props" -- items he used to help him paint various objects in his historic illustrations.  One wall contained over a dozen long rifles.  The main studio room contains boasts a genuine birchbark canoe he used for an illustration he did for "Last of the Mohicans" (see further below), and one whole room is filled with various other props:

N.C. died in a tragic accident in 1945 (when Andrew was about 28), along with a grandson, when the car he was driving stalled on railroad tracks near the home and was hit by a train.  That event was an emotional and artistic watershed for Andrew, whose bleak Chester County landscapes are said to be, in part, an attempt to capture emotions related to that event.

After touring the N.C. Wyeth home and studio, we repaired to the Brandywine River Museum itself to view the exhibits.  Before entering the exhibits, we stopped to admire the sweeping view of the Brandywine River from a second floor foyer:

The Museum presently has a large exhibit of self-taught artists such as Horace Pippin, a great "folk" painter from Chester County, Pennsylvania, and the inimitable "Grandma" Moses.  But more to the point of our earlier tour today, there was also an exhibit of many paintings by N.C. Wyeth and his grandson (Andrew's son), Jamie Wyeth.

It's almost impossible to describe the power of N.C. Wyeth's original paintings for the illustrations of such things as the Robert Louis Stevenson books.  The paintings are large -- perhaps 4 feet by 6 feet, and rich in color and depth.  While this painting that was used as an illustration for "Last of the Mohicans" was not necessarily the best or most powerful of the paintings, we took note of it because it is the painting in which N.C. depicted the birchbark canoe sitting in his studio:

Our story is primarily about N.C. Wyeth and not about Andrew or Jamie, but it was interesting to see some of their paintings on exhibit.  The Jamie Wyeth work that interested David the most was this assemblage painting of Andy Warhol:

It would be impossible to choose a favorite Andrew Wyeth painting, but, of course, this one -- "Christina's World" -- is perhaps his most famous.  The model for the female figure in the painting is a woman named Christina Olsen, whose family lived near the Wyeths.

That background made this David's unexpected favorite Andrew Wyeth painting of the exhibit.  Painted in 1952, only four years after "Christina's World," it portrays Christina as an older woman.  Before David learned that it was Christina, however, he was drawn to the painting because, in this work, she cuddles a kitten, giving a dramatic tone of tenderness overlaying the various other emotions attendant to her simple dress, the obvious poverty and desiccation of the room in which she sits, and her face that shows a life of hard work:

 

What a wealth of experience we had today, from Longwood Gardens, to learning about N.C. Wyeth and his children, to viewing a whole new selection of paintings relevant to all that!  We'll be thinking about and processing all these things for some time hereafter.