Henriette Wyeth

Henriette Wyeth was born in Wilmington, Delaware, into an artistic family. Wyeth was the eldest of the five children of noted illustrator N.C. Wyeth and his wife Carolyn Bockius. Her siblings Carolyn and Andrew also became artists, and all three studied with their father. Andrew Wyeth became the most well-known artist of this family. Henriette contracted polio at age 3, which altered her health and use of her right hand. As a result, she learned to draw with her left hand and paint with her right. She grew up on the family farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and attended local Quaker schools. She and her siblings were eventually homeschooled because their father distrusted the public school system. She began formal art lessons with her father at age 11, making charcoal studies and geometric shapes. == Artistic career ==

A child prodigy, Wyeth's work spanned portraits of adults and children, still lifes, and floral landscapes. In her work, she "often included objects that related to the subject's interest or personality". She eventually stopped painting children because, as she said, "today's children--they are so deadpan." == Personal life ==

At age 21, in 1929 Wyeth married artist Peter Hurd, a fellow student at the Pennsylvania Academy and her father's apprentice. The couple had three children together: Peter Jr., Carolyn, and Michael Hurd. In the mid-1930s they moved to San Patricio, New Mexico, settling on a farm of 40 acres. By 1939, they established the Sentinel Ranch there, gradually acquiring more land until they had 2200 acres. It was in southern New Mexico near Roswell, New Mexico, her husband's birthplace. Wyeth's father was not happy when they left the Pennsylvania area. As she said in a 1989 interview, "He felt I should not let marriage interfere with my painting" and worried that living on a ranch would draw her energy from it. Henriette Wyeth, however, did continue to paint for the rest of her life and was inspired by the landscape. Later health problems prevented her from making art. She criticized contemporary television and feminism, and said that modern society had "blunted" children. ==Death==

Henriette Wyeth died in her Roswell, New Mexico home-studio from complications from pneumonia in April 1997. ==Legacy==

According to her biography on the Wyeth Hurd Gallery website, she was "considered by many art scholars to be one of the great women painters of the 20th century". Her papers, and those of her husband (who died in 1984), are in the Archives of American Art at the Smithsonian Institution. == Exhibitions ==

, El Paso, Texas. Much of her work is held by the Roswell Museum and Art Center, in Roswell Wyeth's work has also been exhibited at such notable institution as the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute of Chicago and New Mexico's Roswell Museum of Art. • Exhibition of Paintings by Peter Hurd & Henriette Wyeth (1967), the Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts, Columbus, Ohio Her work has also been included in a number of posthumous exhibitions: • ''The Wyeths' Wyeths'' (2010), Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine • The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art (2010), Dulwich Picture Gallery, London • ''The Wyeths: America's Artists'' (2011), Kalamazoo Institute of the Arts, Kalamazoo, Michigan • Nomads: Traversing Adolescence (2013), Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Kansas, and Kemper East, Kansas City, Missouri == See also ==