Andrew Wyeth American, 1917-2009
Big Rocks, 1974
Watercolor on paper
28 1/4 x 22 7/8 inches
Signed at upper left and lower right: Andrew Wyeth
Andrew Wyeth, perhaps the most successful in a family replete with brilliant artists, worked in a variety of media, but his accomplishments in watercolor have made a lasting impact on...
Andrew Wyeth, perhaps the most successful in a family replete with brilliant artists, worked in a variety of media, but his accomplishments in watercolor have made a lasting impact on the medium. While his father, Newell Convers Wyeth, worked extensively as an illustrator, Andrew’s mode was more poetic and understated, depicting scenes from his own life. His early breakthrough, Christina’s World (Museum of Modern Art, New York), made the young painter a household name. The rest of his career saw the artist moving towards less overt narratives—a conscious decision that the artist remarked upon frequently.
If he found less overt narratives, Wyeth returned periodically to poetic evocations of solitude. Absence is a major theme of Wyeth’s work broadly, evoked often by empty environments, or the talismanic objects that are stand-ins for absent human figures. By felicitous coincidence, Andrew was born on the birthday of one of America’s great hermits, Henry David Thoreau, and his work, in all subjects, rings with the same quiet energy of On Walden Pond.
Richard Meryman, Wyeth’s biographer, observed: "The spine of Wyeth’s Pennsylvania life has been the walk he has taken thousands of times, always the same during the boyhood flights from his father’s eye, during the first years of his marriage, then during the 1950s – during all his life" (as quoted by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock, Looking Out, Looking In, 2014, p. 66).
A stop on Wyeth’s many walks in Chadds Ford brought him in contact with a neighbor, Helga Testorf. Testorf and her husband were German-Americans who had moved to Chadds Ford in the early 1960s, Helga taking work as a caretaker for the Kuerners, neighbors of the Wyeths. Wyeth described his relationship with Helga: "The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. … I have to become enamored. Smitten. That’s what happened when I saw Helga" (as quoted by James Gardner in “A Villain in Pigtails” in the New York Sun, Nov. 2, 2006).
That personal contact between Helga and the artist was the spark of intense intrigue when a parcel of over two-hundred drawings and paintings of the woman emerged in the late 1980s. The relationship began in the 1970s, when the present work was executed, and continued through the mid 1980s. Helga posed nude for the artist, but often depictions of Wyeth’s muse are frank portrayals of the quotidian.
The present work is from early in his work with Helga, painted in 1974. Helga is in a walking cape in Chadds Ford, identified as the woods behind the N.C. Wyeth house. Wyeth frequently painted Helga in this cape—a heavy garment that keeps off the winter cold and, as in In the Orchard (1985), the spring chill. Pictorially, it joins her with the environment, but its weight and texture provide a rough carapace against the smooth skin and soft hair of the model.
The great coat was so loved that Wyeth dressed Helga in it in indoor scenes as well, as in The Prussian (1985). “To my mind,” the artist wrote in text to accompany the 1985 painting, “the master is the one who can simultaneously give the effect of simplicity and restraint—yet you can go right up to it and explore it endlessly with the greatest joy” (Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, 1987, p. 72). These remarks apply equally well to the present work, which is a sea of details unified by broad, simple forms. He elaborates the texture of the model’s hair just as carefully as in The Prussian, balancing these details against the branches and bark of the trees.
The present work is also notable for the compositional placement of the model with her back the viewer. Many examples exist of Helga with her face to us—indeed, Wyeth’s personal attraction to the particularities of his muse are best expressed in the portraits of Helga. He also, as in Easter Sunday, set her profile against a broad landscape view, or juxtaposed against an open window, one of his favorite motifs. This is expertly deployed in masterpieces like Cape Coat and Refuge. The latter heightens the sense of drama by placing the soft white skin of his model leaning up against the rough, dark tree bark, as if nestling into it for refuge against the hold and hard winter, which creeps all around with icy fingers.
But the present work features Helga with her back fully turned, a gesture that hearkens all the way back to Wyeth’s first great success: Christina’s World. In that work, the model’s back is to us and her gaze looks longingly to the distance. Here, the obvious narrative element is toned down to a moment of reflection, frozen like the snow-packed earth depicted. But the figure’s closed off positioning nonetheless leaves the viewer, as in Christina’s World, on the outside of a private moment. We can observe, we can imagine ourselves in the figure’s place, but more is concealed than disclosed.
Wyeth reworked the scene in several different works, including very sketchy pencil drawings and highly-developed watercolors, all entitled Campfire. Indeed, the campfire at the center of the present work is emphasized by the joining dark forms in the near-field, forming a V-shape that centers the composition around a cameo portrait of Helga, in contemplation, perhaps. The fire burns low, perhaps a stand-in for the artist himself.
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it—the dead feeling of winter,” Wyeth wrote, in text accompanying a related work. “Something waits beneath it—the whole story doesn’t show” (Wyeth, p. 182).
If he found less overt narratives, Wyeth returned periodically to poetic evocations of solitude. Absence is a major theme of Wyeth’s work broadly, evoked often by empty environments, or the talismanic objects that are stand-ins for absent human figures. By felicitous coincidence, Andrew was born on the birthday of one of America’s great hermits, Henry David Thoreau, and his work, in all subjects, rings with the same quiet energy of On Walden Pond.
Richard Meryman, Wyeth’s biographer, observed: "The spine of Wyeth’s Pennsylvania life has been the walk he has taken thousands of times, always the same during the boyhood flights from his father’s eye, during the first years of his marriage, then during the 1950s – during all his life" (as quoted by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock, Looking Out, Looking In, 2014, p. 66).
A stop on Wyeth’s many walks in Chadds Ford brought him in contact with a neighbor, Helga Testorf. Testorf and her husband were German-Americans who had moved to Chadds Ford in the early 1960s, Helga taking work as a caretaker for the Kuerners, neighbors of the Wyeths. Wyeth described his relationship with Helga: "The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. … I have to become enamored. Smitten. That’s what happened when I saw Helga" (as quoted by James Gardner in “A Villain in Pigtails” in the New York Sun, Nov. 2, 2006).
That personal contact between Helga and the artist was the spark of intense intrigue when a parcel of over two-hundred drawings and paintings of the woman emerged in the late 1980s. The relationship began in the 1970s, when the present work was executed, and continued through the mid 1980s. Helga posed nude for the artist, but often depictions of Wyeth’s muse are frank portrayals of the quotidian.
The present work is from early in his work with Helga, painted in 1974. Helga is in a walking cape in Chadds Ford, identified as the woods behind the N.C. Wyeth house. Wyeth frequently painted Helga in this cape—a heavy garment that keeps off the winter cold and, as in In the Orchard (1985), the spring chill. Pictorially, it joins her with the environment, but its weight and texture provide a rough carapace against the smooth skin and soft hair of the model.
The great coat was so loved that Wyeth dressed Helga in it in indoor scenes as well, as in The Prussian (1985). “To my mind,” the artist wrote in text to accompany the 1985 painting, “the master is the one who can simultaneously give the effect of simplicity and restraint—yet you can go right up to it and explore it endlessly with the greatest joy” (Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures, 1987, p. 72). These remarks apply equally well to the present work, which is a sea of details unified by broad, simple forms. He elaborates the texture of the model’s hair just as carefully as in The Prussian, balancing these details against the branches and bark of the trees.
The present work is also notable for the compositional placement of the model with her back the viewer. Many examples exist of Helga with her face to us—indeed, Wyeth’s personal attraction to the particularities of his muse are best expressed in the portraits of Helga. He also, as in Easter Sunday, set her profile against a broad landscape view, or juxtaposed against an open window, one of his favorite motifs. This is expertly deployed in masterpieces like Cape Coat and Refuge. The latter heightens the sense of drama by placing the soft white skin of his model leaning up against the rough, dark tree bark, as if nestling into it for refuge against the hold and hard winter, which creeps all around with icy fingers.
But the present work features Helga with her back fully turned, a gesture that hearkens all the way back to Wyeth’s first great success: Christina’s World. In that work, the model’s back is to us and her gaze looks longingly to the distance. Here, the obvious narrative element is toned down to a moment of reflection, frozen like the snow-packed earth depicted. But the figure’s closed off positioning nonetheless leaves the viewer, as in Christina’s World, on the outside of a private moment. We can observe, we can imagine ourselves in the figure’s place, but more is concealed than disclosed.
Wyeth reworked the scene in several different works, including very sketchy pencil drawings and highly-developed watercolors, all entitled Campfire. Indeed, the campfire at the center of the present work is emphasized by the joining dark forms in the near-field, forming a V-shape that centers the composition around a cameo portrait of Helga, in contemplation, perhaps. The fire burns low, perhaps a stand-in for the artist himself.
“I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure in the landscape—the loneliness of it—the dead feeling of winter,” Wyeth wrote, in text accompanying a related work. “Something waits beneath it—the whole story doesn’t show” (Wyeth, p. 182).
