Andrew Wyeth American, 1917-2009

It was watercolors such as these that introduced the young Andrew Wyeth to the art world as a prodigious talent, a master of the medium, and an artist acutely in tune with a particular place, the coast of Maine near Port Clyde, where he had summered from the time he was a small child. He was barely twenty when the venerable Macbeth Gallery in New York gave Wyeth his debut in October 1937 with a show of large, brilliantly colored transparent watercolors, all Maine subjects, which a host of surprised critics ranked with the work of Winslow Homer. [1] But even Homer lacked Wyeth’s energy and facility in watercolor, wrote an enthusiastic Henry McBride in the New York Sun, he lacked the confidence and muscularity that was on full display across Wyeth’s generously-sized sheets. [2] Many of those in the art press who appraised the young Wyeth’s gifts suggested the inevitability that he should gain such artistic prowess at an early age given what he might have learned directly, and by osmosis, from his famous artist father, N.C. Wyeth. But watercolor was never his father’s medium, and even the elder Wyeth recognized that his son’s feeling for the medium was innate.

Wyeth explained quite early on that his obsession with watercolor came of its sensitivity “to every impulse of an inspired moment.” [3] Each gesture was a record of an emotional reaction to a quality of light, a color on the water, the flash of an underwater world, and patterns created by the pebbles, shells, and sea kelp deposited at the water’s edge, at his feet, by the waves and tides. He liked the sport of it, he said, the challenge of holding chance effects and his deliberate mark making in perfect check. [4] He allowed as how such spontaneity required rigorous exercise, however, hours of regular “brush practice” so as to develop his watercolorist’s arm, and periods of close and deep observation. [5] “In Maine, I’d lie on my belly for an hour watching the tide rising, creeping slowly over everything,” he said. [6] Building a picture’s mood came of planning, and drawing, too. Often when a moment presented itself, Wyeth would record it quickly in an ink sketch and develop it further in subsequent painting outings and in the studio. For Wyeth, watercolor freed the hand and the imagination but it tested the ability of the artist to create in a picture that wondrous sense of absolute truth.

Fresh, breezy, moody, rich in color—critics in 1937 praised the overall effect of these expansive watercolor sheets of Wyeth’s but openly wondered if the painterly productions betrayed a young artist’s casualness with respect to form. In his next New York exhibition of watercolors, in 1939, Macbeth and Wyeth strategically extended the selection to include a room of ink drawings with wash and what they were already calling “dry-brush” watercolors to put to rest the doubts of the skeptics and to reveal the draughtsmanship and discipline that underlay his reductive loose watercolor style. [7] They showed, too, the breadth of this still young man’s artistic experience: these drawings introduced the other side of Wyeth that was emerging in his art, his Chadds Ford side, where the landscape of weathered grey field stones and trodden earth was not translatable in the luminous vermillion and green that was the Maine of his boyhood summers captured on bright white watercolor paper.

—Patricia Junker

[1] New York, Macbeth Gallery, First Exhibition: Water Colors by Andrew Wyeth, October 19-November 1, 1937.

[2] Henry McBride, “Attractions in the Galleries,” New York Sun, October 23, 1937, clipping in Macbeth Gallery Scrapbook, February 1935-January 1938, Macbeth Gallery Records, Archives of American Art (AAA), Smithsonian Institution, Series 5: Scrapbooks, 1892-1952, Scrapbook 15, Box 127, folder 2.

[3] “Andrew Wyeth, One of America’s Youngest and Most Talented Painters,” American Artist 6, no. 7 (September 1942), p. 18.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Ibid.

[6] Wyeth in Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 1998), p. 345.

[7] New York, Macbeth Gallery, Second Exhibition of Water Colors by Andrew Wyeth, October 10-30, 1939. The catalogue states that a group of “Dry-Brush and Wash Drawings” is on view in the South Gallery, and a typed checklist attached, in the gallery’s scrapbook, gives titles of many Chadds Ford subjects. Macbeth Gallery Scrapbook, AAA, 1938 January-1941 July, Box 128, folder 1.