The animal kingdom is for Jamie Wyeth a universe not unlike our own, and he possesses the keen imagination to open it up and invite us in. In 1979, he illustrated his mother’s children’s book, The Stray, a fable set in Chadds Ford in which barnyard animals embody all the people Jamie and his mother knew and loved; they inhabit locales from Andrew Wyeth’s paintings; and they act out their own feats of derring-do, just like the seafarers N.C. Wyeth brought to life in his illustrations. Jamie’s own pet pig, Den Den, is a heroine of the story. He could picture her in all her queenliness because he knew her personality, he felt with her that bond of a child, before our capacity to doubt destroys our ability to accept “that which cannot be explained,” a favorite phrase of Jamie Wyeth’s. [1] Goose Crossing is a grand barnyard promenade, the piglet politely regarding the elegant, casual, self-absorbed, passersby. And the Cow Jumped . . ., begs the question, do cows have the capacity to fantasize? Wyeth coaxed gulls into his Monhegan studio to match wits with these intimidating birds.

Even in still life, life is the operative word for Wyeth. N. C. Wyeth had found his “profoundest inspiration,” he once wrote, in plumbing the mysteries that linked all matter—“whether it happens to be one of my own children or a withered leaf.” [2] This was Wyeth family credo: all nature possesses an animating energy. In Jamie’s Buttercups (fig. 14), a chorus line of squash engage in lively interplay on a kitchen shelf, the moving shadows cast by the fretwork brackets upon the wall challenging further the notion of stillness.

[1] The line is invoked by Timothy Standring in the film Jamie Wyeth and the Unflinching Eye.

[2] N.C. Wyeth, in a letter to his wife, May 3, 1917, quoted in Patricia Junker, “Marking Time: 1917-1949), in Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2017), p. 11.