42 Facts About Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist and one of the best-known American artists of the middle 20th century.

Andrew Wyeth's father, the illustrator and artist N C Wyeth, was a key member of the Brandywine School of artists and illustrators.

Andrew Wyeth's influences included the landscape artist Winslow Homer, American philosopher and naturalist Henry David Thoreau, and filmmaker King Vidor.

Andrew Wyeth's wife, Betsy, managed his career and was a strong influence in his work.

Andrew Wyeth is known for The Helga Pictures and his paintings of windows.

Andrew Wyeth was born July 12,1917, on the 100th anniversary of Henry David Thoreau's birth.

One major influence, discussed at length by Andrew Wyeth himself, was King Vidor's The Big Parade.

Andrew Wyeth claimed to have seen the film, which depicted family dynamics similar to his own, "a hundred-and-eighty-times" and believed it had the greatest influence on his work.

Vidor later made a documentary, The Metaphor, where he and Andrew Wyeth discuss the influence of the film on his paintings, including Winter 1946, Snow Flurries, Portrait of Ralph Kline and Afternoon Flight of a Boy up a Tree.

Andrew Wyeth created illustrations for books such as Treasure Island and The Last of the Mohicans.

Andrew Wyeth studied art history on his own, admiring many masters of Renaissance and American painting, especially Winslow Homer.

Andrew Wyeth referred to his father's death as a formative emotional event in his artistic career, in addition to being a personal tragedy.

Shortly afterwards, Andrew Wyeth's art consolidated into his mature and enduring style.

On May 15,1940, Andrew Wyeth married Betsy James, whom he met in 1939 in Maine.

Jamie Andrew Wyeth, born in 1946, followed his father's and grandfather's footsteps, becoming the third generation of Andrew Wyeth artists.

On January 16,2009, Andrew Wyeth died in his sleep in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, after a brief illness.

In 1937, at age twenty, Andrew Wyeth had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City.

Andrew Wyeth's style was different from his father's: more spare, "drier," and more limited in color range.

Andrew Wyeth was a visual artist, primarily classified as a realist painter, like Winslow Homer or Thomas Eakins.

Andrew Wyeth gravitated to several identifiable landscape subjects and models.

Andrew Wyeth developed an extraordinary intimacy with the land and sea and strove for a spiritual understanding based on history and unspoken emotion.

Andrew Wyeth typically created dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush, or egg tempera.

Ring Road reflects the earth tones that Andrew Wyeth used throughout his career.

Andrew Wyeth painted Winter 1946, which depicts a neighbor boy, Allan Lynch, running aimlessly down a bleak hill, his hand reaching out.

Andrew Wyeth began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, his neighbors in Chadds Ford.

However, Andrew Wyeth ultimately decided not to include any cows in the painting; only their tracks in the grass remain.

Andrew Wyeth painted the church in several landscapes during its active period, and the abandoned building walls appear in Ring Road.

In 1986, extensive coverage was given to the revelation of a series of 247 studies of the German-born Helga Testorf, whom Andrew Wyeth met while she was attending to Karl Kuerner at his farm.

Andrew Wyeth painted her over the period 1971 to 1985 without the knowledge of either his wife or Helga's husband, John Testorf.

Andrew Wyeth 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.

Andrew Wyeth had already given a few Helga paintings to friends, including the famous Lovers, which had been given as a gift to Andrew Wyeth's wife.

In 2014, the National Gallery of Art held an exhibition, "Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In", of 60 works of art that depict windows, such as Wind from the Sea, Spring Fed, Off at Sea, and Rod and Reel.

Andrew Wyeth illustrated different perspectives, like works of windows seen through windows, flowing curtains, and life outside the windows.

Andrew Wyeth began to add portraits in the 1960s, such as Up in the Studio, a drybrush portrait of his sister Carolyn.

In works such as The Patriot, a portrait of Ralph Cline, Andrew Wyeth looked beyond the surface to understand who he was painting.

Andrew Wyeth wore a big hat and overalls and chewed tobacco.

When Christina Olson died in the winter of 1969, Andrew Wyeth refocused his artistic attention upon Siri Erickson, capturing her naked innocence in The Sauna.

Andrew Wyeth developed technically beautiful works, had a large following and accrued a considerable fortune as a result.

Andrew Wyeth provided one name for both categories: Andrew Wyeth.

Admirers of Andrew Wyeth's art believe that his paintings, in addition to their pictorial formal beauty, contain strong emotional currents, symbolic content, and underlying abstraction.

Andrew Wyeth created work in sharp contrast to abstraction, which gained currency in American art and critical thinking in the middle of the 20th century.

Museum exhibitions of Andrew Wyeth's paintings have set attendance records, but many art critics have evaluated his work less favorably.