Overflow Study depicts Helga Testorf, the artist's longtime muse, in a reclined pose. This drawing is a study for the drybrush, Overflow (1978; Private collection).

Andrew Wyeth's notorious Helga pictures consist of a series of drawings, watercolors, dry brushes, and temperas of model Helga Testorf begun in 1971 and continued over the next decade and a half. Helga worked as a nurse and caretaker to the Wyeths' neighbors and friends, the Kuerner family. While the Kuerners themselves were frequent features in Wyeth's work, after being introduced to Helga, Wyeth painted her in secret for nearly fifteen years. When Wyeth unveiled the pieces in 1986, the cache of artwork generated intrigue, causing such a stir that Helga even adorned the covers of Time and Newsweek in the summer of 1986. Wyeth sold most of the series to Leonard E. B. Andrews, the publishing entrepreneur and art collector, who, during his ownership, loaned them to a landmark exhibition at the National Gallery of Art. A rare occasion in which the museum exhibited a living artist, American Drawings and Watercolors of the Twentieth Century: Andrew Wyeth, the Helga Pictures, traveled extensively from 1987 to 1989.

Wyeth described his relationship to Helga, explaining, "The difference between me and a lot of painters is that I have to have a personal contact with my models. I don't mean a sexual love, I mean a real love. Many artists don't recall the names of their models. I have to fall in love with mine… I have to become enamored. Smitten. That's what happened when I saw Helga walking up the Kuerners' lane." [1] Similar circumstances create a throughline in the art historical canon. Helga Testorf's role as Wyeth's muse parallels Sandro Botticelli's fifteenth-century depictions of Simonetta Vespucci and Eduard Manet's nineteenth-century masterworks featuring his favored model, Victorine Meurent. The Helga series remains a remarkable achievement of Wyeth's acclaimed career, a series of masterstrokes from an icon of twentieth-century art.

[1] Andrew Wyeth and Thomas Hoving, Wyeth on Helga: The Helga Paintings in Andrew Wyeth's Own Words, Naples: Naples Museum of Art, 2006, p. 7