Inspired by Winslow Homer's watercolors, Wyeth painted an
impressionistic watercolor,
Coot Hunter, about 1933. There he experimented with the "fleeting effects of light and movement". In 1937, at age twenty, Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings sold out, and his life path seemed certain. His style was different from his father's: more spare, "drier," and more limited in color range. He stated his belief that "the great danger of the
Pyle school is picture-making." He did some book illustrations in his early career, but not to the extent that N. C. Wyeth did. Some feel Wyeth's work went against modernist ideals by embodying middle-class values, but this caused conversations about his work to extend beyond painting to social class. In his art, Wyeth's favorite subjects were the land and people around him, both in his hometown of
Chadds Ford,
Pennsylvania, and at his summer home in
Cushing,
Maine. In 1958, Andrew and Betsy Wyeth purchased and restored "The Mill", a group of 18th-century buildings that appeared often in his work, including
Night Sleeper (1979, private collection).
Brinton's Mill was added to the
National Register of Historic Places in 1971. Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth maintained a realist painting style for over seventy years. He gravitated to several identifiable landscape subjects and models. His solitary walks were the primary means of inspiration for his landscapes. He developed an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strove for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion. He typically created dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor,
drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg
tempera. The Olson house has been preserved and renovated to match its appearance in ''Christina's World''. It is open to the public as a part of the
Farnsworth Art Museum. Because of Wyeth's profile, the property was designated a
National Historic Landmark in June 2011.
Kuerner Farm , in Chadds Ford Township, Delaware County, Pennsylvania, named a National Historic Landmark in 2011. Wyeth began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, his neighbors in Chadds Ford. Like the Olsons, the Kuerners and their farm were one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 30 years. He stated about the
Kuerner Farm, "I didn't think it a picturesque place. It just excited me, purely abstractly and purely emotionally."
Brown Swiss (1957, private collection) is one of many paintings that he made from the 1950s to the 1970s of Karl and Anna Kuerner's farm in Chadds Ford. While the painting is named after the Brown Swiss cows Karl Kuerner owned, it shows the Kuerner farmhouse and the reflection of the house in the farm pond. However, Wyeth ultimately decided not to include any cows in the painting; only their tracks in the grass remain. Chadds Ford contained a small enclave of African-Americans known as "Little Africa." The community settled around Mother Archie's Church, a Quaker schoolhouse converted to a house of worship. Andrew Wyeth painted the church in several landscapes during its active period, and the abandoned building walls appear in Ring Road (1985). African-American residents of Little Africa appear as recurring models for Wyeth's paintings. The Kuerner Farm is available to tour through the
Brandywine River Museum, as is the nearby N. C. Wyeth House and Studio; in 2011, the farm was declared a National Historic Landmark, based on its association with Wyeth.
Helga paintings In 1986, extensive coverage was given to the revelation of a series of 247 studies of the
German-born Helga Testorf, whom Wyeth met while she was attending to Karl Kuerner at his farm. Wyeth painted her over the period 1971 to 1985 without the knowledge of either his wife or Helga's husband, John Testorf. Helga, a caregiver with nursing experience, had never modeled before but quickly became comfortable with the long periods of posing, during which he observed and painted her in intimate detail. The Helga pictures are not an obvious psychological study of the subject, but more an extensive study of her physical landscape set within Wyeth's customary landscapes. She is nearly always portrayed as unsmiling and passive; yet, within those deliberate limitations, Wyeth manages to convey subtle qualities of character and mood, as he does in many of his best portraits. This extensive study of one subject in differing contexts and emotional states is unique in American art. In 1986,
Philadelphia publisher and millionaire
Leonard E.B. Andrews (1925–2009) purchased almost the entire collection, preserving it intact. Wyeth had already given a few Helga paintings to friends, including the famous
Lovers, which had been given as a gift to Wyeth's wife. The works were exhibited at the
National Gallery of Art in 1987 and in a nationwide tour. There was extensive criticism of both the 1987 exhibition and the subsequent tour. The tour was criticized after the fact because, after it ended, the pictures' owner sold his entire cache to a Japanese company, a transaction characterized by
Christopher Benfey as "crass."
Window paintings Wyeth created about 300 works of art—drawings and paintings of tempera and watercolor—of windows. His son, Jaime, stated that his father was "obsessed with windows".
Wind from the Sea depicts a breeze entering a window on the upper floor of the Olson house. It is an example of non-figurative portraiture and was a favorite of the poet
Robert Frost. Made in Cushing, Maine and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania over decades, the works showcase his growth as an artist. The National Gallery of Art states that the windows artwork "offer[s] the clearest understanding of Wyeth's creative process" In works such as
The Patriot (1964), a portrait of Ralph Cline, Wyeth looked beyond the surface to understand who he was painting. Cline was an interesting gentleman 71 years of age, of Native American heritage and Maine humor. He wore a big hat and
overalls and
chewed tobacco. It was through painting him, though, that Wyeth understood that, beneath his humor and hard countenance, Cline was a warm-hearted veteran of great dignity and intellect.
Critical reaction Wyeth's art has long been controversial. He developed technically beautiful works, had a large following and accrued a considerable fortune as a result. Yet critics, curators and historians have offered conflicting views about the importance of his work. Art historian
Robert Rosenblum was asked in 1977 to identify the "most overrated and underrated" artists of the 20th century. He provided one name for both categories: Andrew Wyeth. Admirers of Wyeth's art believe that his paintings, in addition to their pictorial formal beauty, contain strong emotional currents, symbolic content, and underlying abstraction. Most observers of his art agree that he is skilled at handling the medium of egg tempera (which uses egg yolk as its
medium) and watercolor. Wyeth avoided using oil paints. His use of light and shadow lets the subjects illuminate the canvas. His paintings and titles suggest sound, as is implied in many paintings, including
Distant Thunder (1961) and
Spring Fed (1967). ''Christina's World'' became an iconic image, a status unmet to even the best paintings, "that registers as an emotional and cultural reference point in the minds of millions." Some found Wyeth's art of rural subject matter tired and oversweet.
Metropolitan Museum of Art; the
Whitney Museum of American Art; the
Cincinnati Art Museum; the
Smithsonian American Art Museum, the
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art in
Kansas City; the
Arkansas Art Center in Little Rock; and the
Muscarelle Museum of Art in
Williamsburg, VA. President George W. Bush and Laura Bush decorated a room of the
White House in Washington, D.C., with Wyeth paintings from their collection. • Especially large collections of the
Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania; the
Farnsworth Art Museum in
Rockland, Maine; • Museum collections throughout the world, including the National Museum of Modern Art in Tokyo; the Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg; the Palazzo Reale in Milan; and the Académie des Beaux Arts in Paris, among many other museums. ==Honors and awards==