Andrew Wyeth

Andrew Wyeth was a widely celebrated American artist who specialized in realist watercolor and tempera paintings of people and landscapes. His best-known work, Christina’s World (1948), depicts a young women laying in the grass and looking towards a farmhouse. Despite the work’s everyday subject matter, it is filled with a haunting sense of urgency and foreboding dread. While his work has been deemed melancholic, the artist preferred to describe it as thoughtful. “I think anything like that—which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone—people always feel is sad,” he once reflected. Born on July 12, 1917 in Chadds Ford, PA, he was the son of the illustrator N.C. Wyeth. Throughout his career, Wyeth’s figurative paintings remained popular even in a postwar era dominated by abstraction. The solitary and largely self-taught painter caused controversy in the 1980s with the Helga Pictures, a series of over 200 works that included nudes of a married German housekeeper that would later become Wyeth’s studio assistant. The artist died on January 16, 2009 at the age of 91 in his hometown of Chadds Ford, PA. Today, his works are held in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., The Whitney Museum of Art in New York, and The Museum of Modern Art in New York, among many others.

courtesy of Artnet