Incorrect title. The correct title is “Dr. Syn,” a 1981 tempera.
This is a self-portrait by Andrew Wyeth, painted after his double hip replacement surgery in 1981. The painting was given as a birthday gift from the artist to his wife Betsy.
1970 watercolor. The painting Evening at Kuerners was not simply about a time of day, a quality of light, and a landscape. Initially, Wyeth sought to capture something of what he felt about the dying Karl Kuerner: the light in the ground-floor window was, to Wyeth, Kuerner's flickering soul.
This painting has a title! Title is “Night Sleeper,” a 1979 tempera. Dog's name was Nell Gwyn. The title referenced an overnight train car passing silently through the Wyeth property at night, moving out of the Brandywine Valley en route to someplace far away.
After the deaths of both Christina & Alvaro Olson, Wyeth painted this roof-level view of their abandoned homestead with a chimney crumbling and shingles missing.
In painting his Chadds Ford neighbor Karl Kuerner, Wyeth observed & depicted the passage of time as Kuerner grew older & eventually became ill with leukemia. In this surreal scene, a meditation on death and regeneration, Wyeth imagined Kuerner encased in vestiges of ice at the base of Kuerner Hill.
These lobster buoys belonged to Betsy Wyeth’s brother-in-law who, after a career in business in New York City, and service with the Navy in the South Seas, returned to manage the family lobster fishing business in Maine. Painting was done in Sherwood Cook’s fishhouse in Martinsville, Maine.
This is a self-portrait by Andrew Wyeth, painted after his double hip replacement surgery in 1981. The painting was given as a birthday gift from the artist to his wife Betsy.
Wyeth worked in vain on a tempera that might recreate that vision. In a large bowl he made up a watery mix of yellow-brown ochre and red-brown sienna. He stepped back and threw the liquid across the panel. The dappled panel now looked like the hard ground scored by Karl Kuerner's Brown Swiss cattle.
Wyeth took the bird into his studio, sketched it & then painted it from a worm’s-eye view, magnifying the bird relative to its surroundings & thereby suggests the wider significance of its death. Completed during WWII, it recalls similarly unflinching photographs of corpses lying on battlefields.
1942 tempera owned by the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York. Depicts a dead, frozen crow Wyeth found near his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
1947 tempera; 41-1/8” x 48-1/8.” Location was Westport, Maine. Depicted are the remnants of a farmer's wind-riven scarecrow which suggests a long-forgotten grave. Gifted by S.C. Johnson & Son, Inc. in 1969 to the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC.
