"Spare Room,” 1978, with its crisp lines, solid forms and astute composition, suggests that Carolyn Wyeth learned her lessons well from her illustrator-father, N.C. Wyeth, a stickler for accuracy. Private collection.
N.C. Wyeth, a commanding figure and powerful teacher, insisted that all his children have a solid grounding in the basics of the fine arts, starting with a mastery of drawing. He demanded hard work and achievement as his kids labored over charcoal studies of cubes, pyramids and plaster casts before they took up a brush.
N.C. supplemented training in the basics with study of the achievements of Rembrandt, Constable and the Impressionists, along with such American artists as Winslow Homer, Daniel Garber and Charles Burchfield.
Carolyn was also exposed to the abstract motifs of Modernists, and was influenced by the realism of American Scene regionalist painters like John Steuart Curry and Grant Wood.
Ever the contrarian, Carolyn resisted N.C.'s rules and expectations, taking longer than her siblings to progress from drawing to painting in color. Ignoring her father's mandate to do preliminary sketches or studies, she drew as she pleased in charcoal on canvases and then began painting. "Pa would get so mad about that," she recalled.
While other members of the family tended to turn away from Carolyn and her eccentric behavior, brother Andrew felt sorry for her and became her lifelong protector and supporter. She, in turn, became the older confidante of her youngest sibling.
Although their clash of personalities and N.C.'s failed attempts to tame her slowed Carolyn's progress, she did, as her father urged, come to know, feel and see her subjects first hand and to make those experiences the cornerstones of her work. "As she matured," says Brandywine curator Virginia O'Hara, her father's "advice became her guiding principle."
After a time, Carolyn embraced the artist's life, becoming a talented teacher, as well as relying on her father's model to channel her idiosyncratic ways into a style all her own.
From the start, Carolyn Wyeth's paintings were distinctive, with vivid colors and interesting perspectives, as in "Betsy's Pumpkin,” 1935. She was 26 and still studying with her father, N.C. Wyeth, when this was painted. Brandywine River Museum.
By her early 20s, Carolyn had shaped her own form of expression — "I painted what I goddamn wanted," she said — and showing considerable promise, began to win exhibition awards and other prizes. Her work in shows in Philadelphia, Wilmington and Chester County was hailed by critics as "forthright," "simple," "direct" and "effective," and was seen as bringing a "deep-burning vital intensity to solidly visioned forms."
While proud of Carolyn's work, N.C. withheld praise, thinking perhaps that this would cause her to seek his advice. Nevertheless, writing to his family in 1940, he raved about her painting "Mask of Keats," circa 1940: "If she never painted another thing, this will record a truly important talent."
In "Dark Shore," 1933, a dark, foreboding and evocative image of an empty rowboat riding against the shore is balanced across an expanse of black water by a ribbon of golden horizon. Later, she remarked on her affinity for the "somber pictures" of John Constable, Winslow Homer and her brother Andrew. "Dark Shore" is also, in some ways, reminiscent of her father's structured images.
Drawing on her observations around home, she incorporated sights such as chairs, tables, vegetables, props from her father's studio or woods and fields near her home into still lifes. In "The Cabbage," 1935, and "Betsy's Pumpkin," 1944, she imbued humble vegetables with a kind of dignity and elegance when placed on a blue and white tablecloth. The subtle color touches in the latter, especially, suggest her older sister Henriette's intuitive feel for color.
In spite of clashes with N.C., Carolyn continued to live at home, where, like her father, she drew "inspiration for her art and the solitude to create it," observes O'Hara. "What inspired me in my painting is this whole damn place here — every tree, every rock, the fields, the hills, the studio, the smell of the place, everything I just love," Carolyn said. Indeed, there is a strong sense of peace and serenity in and around the historic house.
"N.C. Wyeth's Barn,” 1974, depicts the view through leafless trees of the white barn built by Carolyn's father adjacent to their brick house in Chadds Ford, Penn. Brandywine River Museum.
Her vigorously painted "The Rail Pile" was executed in 1945, the year her father and a grandson died when their car stalled at a Chadds Ford railroad crossing and was struck by a train.
Carolyn was married for a few years, "but that's not good for a woman artist," she declared. "I needed that aloneness. Anyway, I'm too damn independent to be married. My husband said, 'You put your damn dogs first, even before your art' — which is probably true."
From the early 1940s into the 1970s, Carolyn taught art to select students in Chadds Ford and in the summer in Maine. With instruction based on her father's model, she taught about ten students at a time, using N.C.'s old studio and his props, and, as O'Hara puts it, "critiques assuredly more lenient than N.C.'s" She also trained her teenaged nephew, Jamie Wyeth, and nieces, Anna B. and Robin McCoy, following N.C.'s program requiring mastery of geometric shapes and plaster casts before working in color.
Other oils close to home include "Deep Summer (II)," circa 1956, "Chicken House," 1967, and "Spare Room," 1978. These paintings, observes O'Hara, "are deceptively straightforward compositions that seem to be solely about shape, color and texture. But there is no mistaking their pervasive reflective mood that tantalizingly hints at her inner world." Carolyn once remarked that the chicken house, which her father built for her when she was 11 or 12, was a particularly favored place, home to a variety of her pet animals. "I've probably painted more pictures there than any other place," she said.
"Up from the Woods," 1974, shows the red-brick family home peeping over a brown foreground. It was built by N.C. Wyeth with proceeds from his acclaimed illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson's
Treasure Island
in 1911. The spacious studio, with grand windows looking out over the valley — "the most glorious sight in this township" — was constructed up the hill soon thereafter. The Brandywine Museum now owns the land and buildings, which are restored to look as they did in N.C.'s heyday.
Interesting colors and shapes make this otherwise mundane scene come alive. "The Rail Pile” was painted by Carolyn in 1945, the year her father was killed when a passing train struck his stalled car at a nearby Chadds Ford railway crossing. Brandywine River Museum.
Like her father, Carolyn painted — and painted well — jugs and bottles in composed indoor settings, as demonstrated by "Still Life with Jug and Bottle," no date. Like her brother, she focused on an everyday jar sitting by itself in a rough wooden box in a dark field in "Mason Jar," circa 1953.
In the 1930s, the Wyeth family began to spend summers in the picturesque fishing port of Port Clyde, Maine, occupying an old sea captain's house that N.C. named after one of his favorite Homer paintings, "Eight Bells." There Carolyn painted "The Jones House," 1937, a quintessential midcoast white frame house surrounded by fir trees. It won first prize in the Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts annual exhibition.
One of the most interesting paintings of the 1930s is "Shostakovich," circa 1935, an unpublished cover design for an audio recording of the music of Russian composer Dimitri Shostakovich. It shows the musician at work on a score backed by a river, spires and factories belching smoke — symbols of the industrialization of the Soviet Union.
After her mother's death in 1973, Carolyn took over the Wyeth family home and studio, festooned with N.C.'s props, ranging from a birch bark canoe to graceful vases to back issues of the
National Geographic Magazine.
She lived the rest of her life there with her dogs and art on which she worked with deliberation and care. "I'm not exactly a recluse," she told an interviewer in 1979, "but nearly so…as close as I can….I think the best thing is a goddamn quiet life." Moreover, she added, "People don't mean that much to me."
Carolyn created only three or four works a year and did little to promote her oeuvre. She exhibited infrequently and did not sign many paintings because she thought there was so little interest in them. Carolyn said she had little interest in selling her work. "I paint because it gives me a kick inside," she said. "It lets me explore the way I feel toward things." Exhibitions in the 1970s at the R.W. Norton Museum in Shreveport and the Brandywine River Museum generated some recognition.
This photograph taken by N.C. Wyeth in 1918 shows his children in character: left to right, Ann, 4, who became a musician and artist; Nathaniel, 7, an engineer and inventor; Andrew, 1, the painter; Henriette, 11, a painter, and Carolyn, 9, already the eccentric loner on her way to becoming an artist. Brandywine River Museum.
From this period came "N.C.'s Barn," 1974, viewing through leafless trees her father's barn, still indelibly associated with him nearly 30 years after his death. "Husky's Porch," 1976, is a beautifully painted, enigmatic view in the family home of a spot favored by one of her dogs, Husky. She stopped painting in 1979.
On occasion, Carolyn's cleanly realistic style was compared to the far more famous Georgia O'Keeffe's, but she dismissed the comparison. In a l979 interview, she said she found O'Keeffe's work "too cold, too icy."
This revelatory exhibition suggests that the least known of the Wyeth family of artists deserves greater recognition. Because she painted for herself, caring nothing about innovation or competing in the art world, Carolyn worked under the radar of public appreciation. Her pal, brother Andrew, considered her "one of America's preeminent women painters," according to his biographer, Richard Meryman.
In the final analysis, as O'Hara notes, "Painting soothed her 'wild' side and gave coherence to her emotions." In the years since her death, says the curator, "the aesthetic qualities — strength of design, boldness of color, and subtle emotional tenor — in her paintings have been nationally recognized by critics and museums."
Surely this exhibition will raise Carolyn Wyeth's profile and add a special dimension to the oeuvre of "The First Family of American Painting."
The Brandywine River Museum is on Route 1. For information, 610-388-2700 or
www.brandywinemuseum.org
.
