The Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center of the Brandywine Museum of Art confirms that this object is recorded in Betsy James Wyeth's files.

French Connection is a double-sided work.

Verso: Lovers Study, 1980

Pencil on paper
27⅜ x 20¾ inches
69.5 x 52.7 cm

“A sense of something once present and now gone hangs in the air.”[1] This is how one visitor to Wyeth country described its mood, this place where Andrew Wyeth lived and painted his entire life in a landscape colored by the old gray and brown stone farmhouses and mill buildings that still stand on an historic stretch of the Brandywine River. The crossing that is Chadds Ford is famously the Revolutionary War battleground where George Washington and his French comrade, the young Marquis de Lafayette, fought valiantly, though not victoriously, to hold back legions of British forces charging toward Philadelphia. Their presence is strongly felt here in the Brandywine Battleground preserve, in the old houses where Washington and Lafayette were headquartered, in memorializing plaques that identify battleground landmarks, and in the graves of the soldiers from both armies.

Andrew Wyeth’s imagination was fed here, becoming filled with musings on military exploits that he could envision almost cinematically—the Battle of Brandywine, certainly, but also well beyond, from campaigns that ranged from medieval knights in armor to the great naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars and the gruesome clashes of the Great War at the Somme, the Marne, and Verdun. Such images he absorbed in the studio of his father, Newell Convers Wyeth, a veritable cabinet of war props that were source material for the elder Wyeth’s dramatic illustrations of epic wars and heroic warriors. Cupboards were filled with illustrated books and colorful prints that catalogued the great men and historic armies and with riveting, hyper realistic stereopticon photographs taken on the killing fields of World War I France. There were ship models and antique pistols. A death mask of Lafayette and a World War I helmet both hung on a wall. But the best part of the studio—the quickest and surest spur to the imagination—were the historic costumes, chests full of them, including authentic military unforms. They had been used to create the now familiar pictures of fictional characters: Horatio Hornblower, French courtiers, swashbucklers, and the like. Some of these costumes had been handed down to Wyeth Père from his mentor, illustrator Howard Pyle, and they were eventually passed down from father to son, Andrew Wyeth, who had dressed up in them as a child and cherished them into adulthood, donning them at times as his art required to channel the likes of Frenchman Lafayette or British Admiral Horatio, Lord Nelson.[2]

Play acting was essential to Wyeth’s romantic, cinematic imagination, whether it was dressing the part of his heroes or recreating battles and parades with the regiments of toy soldiers that remained always his “silent companions.”[3] “The times I liked best were when I would work out my own little life with my toy soldiers,” Wyeth told his biographer, Richard Meryman. “They were real little people to me,” he said, that allowed him to construct private personal narratives.[4] The same might be said of the costumes and military uniforms in his father’s studio that Wyeth began in the late 1970s to paint in an evolving series, other kinds of “silent companions” subject to the projections upon them of his own inner self.

French Connection and Officer’s Quarters were both painted in N.C. Wyeth’s studio, surely in close succession, in 1980. The former, Wyeth tells us, shows a French dress uniform once belonging to an aide to Napoleon III that had reminded him of the Marquis de Lafayette. “You know, he had soil from the Brandywine Valley put in his coffin in France,” he mused to Thomas Hoving about the spiritual connection to this place that Wyeth believed he and Lafayette shared. “Notice up on the right side the sail of an American sloop of war. The painting is all about my strong feelings for the American Revolutionary War, the aura of which surrounds me here and which I feel from my constant wandering around these hills in the Brandywine Valley.”[5] Wyeth’s affection for Lafayette extends back to one of his earliest temperas, a vertiginous composite view of the Brandywine landscape that included Lafayette’s purported headquarters in the eighteenth-century Gideon Gilpin house in the foreground—an almost Surrealist work that helped to bring Wyeth his first wide critical acclaim and national attention.[6]

Our entrée into the second watercolor here is provided by its title—Officer’s Quarters—which Betsy Wyeth would have chosen for it in tandem with her husband. In 1980, Betsy was deep into the restoration of the nineteenth-century bell tower on Southern Island, off the coast of Maine, a property she bought in 1978. She was recasting the interior as a faithful reproduction of the captain’s quarters of Lord Nelson aboard his ship, HMS Victory, and in the summer of 1981 she made a gift of the building to her husband for his Maine studio. He reciprocated by making her a gift that fall of a related tempera, a self-portrait of sorts, the artist’s skeleton sitting watch in his quarters at the stern of a make-believe warship and, appropriately for the setting of his new studio, wearing the naval jacket from his father’s collection that was nearly identical to Nelson’s own—the jacket he depicted in this watercolor.[7]

In each of the watercolors here, a solitary uniform is displayed in splendid isolation hanging on a door jamb. In Officer’s Quarters, the door is ajar; the conceit employed in both pictures suggests that the wearer has just hung his jacket and repaired, perhaps, to the next room. Heavy shadows impart to each of the coats an aura: Lafayette’s ghost or Nelson’s ghost, perhaps. In these compositions a strongly-felt historical presence quite literally “hangs in the air.”

Andrew Wyeth may have found inspiration and solace at times in his late father’s studio, but he did not use it as his own painting place with any frequency until 1979.[8] These watercolors signal a purposeful change of painting venue for Wyeth. The old studio was a semi-sacred space, preserved in tact just as it had been on that morning of October 19, 1945, when N.C. Wyeth was killed at a nearby railroad crossing. Sister Carolyn’s painting studio was attached, and she eventually conducted a painting school there, too, so the painting rooms were long occupied. What drove Wyeth to take up again in his father’s studio, something he had not done since he was a young man? What drew him inside, into this close, haunted space filled with so many ghosts from the past?

In 1979, and for years after, Wyeth grieved the loss of another close soul, another soldier, Karl Kuerner, his German dairy-farmer neighbor and long-time painting subject, who had died that January, 1979.[9] At this moment, in these rooms filled with war memorabilia, where his father had brought so many long-ago soldiers to life, Wyeth’s imagination could fix on Kuerner. In Wyeth’s mind, Karl was every bit the heroic figure—a Lafayette, a Nelson—molded on the battlefield in the First World War, a German machine gunner. On his death bed, with Wyeth holding vigil, Karl’s hallucinations took him back to the trenches, where, sharply attuned to the faint sound of snapping barbed wire, he fired into the night, killing a whole battalion of French infantrymen. “God, I felt I was there on the Western Front sitting with him,” Wyeth said. “That story broke me loose from where I was—with an old man lying in bed—and I thought, ‘This man is timeless.”[10] Karl was always to Wyeth the soldier he imagined, a gunner with a hair trigger. He painted the elderly Kuerner posing in his own military uniform in The German, in 1975, and other times represented him symbolically by his rifle and his helmet.[11] But like Lafayette in his allegiance to the American cause, Karl was Wyeth’s adoptive countryman now, too. “O, what matters the uniform . . . if your soul’s like a North Sea Storm?”[12] The words are the stirring closing lines of Alfred Noyes’ enduring poem, “The Admiral’s Ghost,” which N.C. Wyeth had illustrated in 1940, a poem his son surely knew and possibly recalled as he mourned the German gunner Karl and painted a pair of officer’s jackets, one French, one British. A soldier’s uniform conveys a man’s dedication to his own country, but it is individual courage, Noyes’ poem asserts, that makes heroes of men, that makes them subjects of veneration, models for all men and for time immemorial.

Karl Kuerner’s death in 1979 meant more specifically for Wyeth a sudden change of circumstances in his ongoing work with the married model Helga Testorf. For the previous four years, he had been drawing and painting her in secret, largely in the upstairs rooms of the Kuerner house, where Testorf worked, out of view of everyone, even the Kuerners and especially Wyeth’s wife, Betsy. Helga had been nursing the dying Karl, so his death brought an awkward end to what had been the subterfuge of artist and model within the Kuerner house, Wyeth explained to Meryman.[13] But with sister Carolyn away to Maine most summers and the permanent closing of her art school, those rooms suddenly became available to Wyeth and Helga for their hideout. The watercolor French Connection is painted on a sheet from the artist’s Helga sketches, which were now at hand in his father’s studio.[14] The two, Wyeth and Helga, were alone here, yet not alone, as the studio was a place not far from prying eyes and a place, too, of ghosts, embodying Wyeth’s vivid memories of his father and a vast record of the dead in Karl Kuerner’s war, and home, too, to silent companions—costumes, death masks, and the unflinching faces who looked out from N.C. Wyeth’s paintings.

[1] E.P. Richardson, “Andrew Wyeth: An Atlantic Portrait,” Atlantic 213, no. 6 (June 1964), p. 63.

[2] For a full description of N.C. Wyeth’s studio as it was in Andrew Wyeth’s painting years see Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (New York: HarperPerennial, 1996), pp. 53-55. Wyeth’s fixation on war and the effect on him of his father’s studio reconstructions of war, are thoughtfully laid out by Christine B. Podmaniczky in “Andrew Wyeth’s War Memory: The Enduring Influence of N.C. Wyeth and World War I,” in Patricia Junker and Audrey Lewis, eds., Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect (New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2017), pp. 30-47.

[3] Ibid., p. 53.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Wyeth to Thomas Hoving, Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), p. 122.

[6] The painting, then titled Late Fall in Pennsylvania, was included with a group of Wyeth temperas in what was a milestone exhibition for the young artist: Americans 1943: Realists and Magic-Realists, at the Museum of Modern Art , New York, in 1943.

[7] In 2017 The Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, organized an exhibition focusing on Wyeth’s tempera, which Betsy Wyeth titled Dr. Syn, and included elements from the painting and the Southern Island studio. The details of the renovation and the reciprocal gifts related to the new studio were pieced together by the exhibition’s curator, Leith MacDonald, and published in Emily Burnham, “Who is Dr. Syn: Unlocking the Secrets of Strange Wyeth Painting,” Bangor Daily News, June 8, 2017, p. 17-18. The jacket depicted in Officer’s Quarters is in the collection of objects in the N.C. Wyeth studio, Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art, Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, and was included in the 2017 exhibition. Nelson’s own jacket, nearly identical to this one, is displayed on the Admiral’s wax effigy in the crypt of Westminster Abbey; https://www.westminster-abbey.org/abbey-commemorations/commemorations/horatio-viscount-nelson.

[8] Wyeth explained this to Meryman, p. 347.

[9] Ibid., p. 53.

[10] Wyeth to Thomas Hoving, quoted Ibid., p. 347.

[11] See Podmaniczky, pp. pp. 38-47.

[12] Alfred Noyes, “The Admiral’s Ghost,” in Edna Johnson and Emma Carrie Scott, comps., Anthology of Children’s Literature, illustrations by N.C. Wyeth (Cambridge: The Riverside Press, 1940), pp. 781-782. The original painting is in the collection of the Free Library of Philadelphia, Children’s Literature Research Collection.

[13] Meryman, p. 347.

[14] Another of the Helga sketches from this time is a composite of the nude model together with the specter of a Horatio Nelson-type figure, who, wearing a similar naval officer’s jacket, strides away toward the door to the adjoining room. This mysterious study may in fact reference another chapter in the Nelson biography, another triggering for Wyeth of the Nelson-type jacket hanging in his father’s studio: that of the Admiral’s famously scandalous affair with the actress and artist’s model Emma Hamilton, with both forsaking their spouses. The drawing is reproduced in John Wilmerding, Andrew Wyeth: The Helga Pictures (New York: Harry N. Abrams, Inc, 1987), p. 80, fig. 70.