There’s a history lesson in the art show — and an art lesson as well. That was the case at this year’s Chadds Ford Elementary School Art Show and Sale. The history lesson involved the Wyeth family while the art lesson was just for fun.
The lessons came during the Saturday session of the two-day event that’s a fundraiser for the school’s PTO. This year’s show was also the 70th anniversary for the show that Betsy Wyeth started when her son Jamie was a student at CFES.
Brandywine River Museum of Art’s Mary Cronin gave a brief history of the Wyeth art family, telling stories about N.C., Andrew and Jamie, and local artists Christine Burke and Diane Micklin held a paint party for kids and adults who want to paint.
Burke and Micklin talked more than a dozen people through the painting of a scene of dandelions being blown away in a breeze. Those attending were taught the use of different brushes and how to mix paints to enhance their palette.
Cronin, the dean of Education and Public Programs at the museum, said N.C. Wyeth came to the area from his native Needham, Mass. to study with Howard Pyle in Wilmington. Pyle chose Wyeth to be one of his select summer students to study with him in Chadds Ford.
Cronin said the biggest takeaway from his time with Pyle was that N.C. learned he needed to know his subject. He took that lesson to heart, she said, by making a few trips out west to see the Navaho before using American Indians in his illustrations.
Later on, N.C. began incorporating his imagination into his work for such illustrations as those for Treasure Island. One of his non-illustration paintings from his imagination — from a dream, actually — was his In a Dream I Met George Washington. Cronin said he had the dream after falling off a ladder while painting a mural of the Battle of Brandywine. That piece shows the artist, standing, talking with George Washington on horseback. Yet N.C. brought his son Andrew into the painting. Andrew is shown sketching in the lower left corner of the painting.
It was the money he made from the Treasure Island illustrations that allowed him to afford to build a home and a studio in Chadds Ford, Cronin said. His children, which included Henriette, Carolyn, Ann, Andrew and Nathaniel, were exposed to their father’s work and spent time in his studio.
N.C. grew famous as an illustrator but feared he would never be known as a serious painter. He wound up with more commissions than he could handle, Cronin said, but he painted seriously for himself. It was his desire to be a serious painter that prompted him to do the strong, very serious self-portrait showing himself with brush and palette.
Andrew Wyeth, she said, loved drawing from an early age, but was considered sickly and never went to school. He was tutored at home so he was able to spend a lot of time walking through the fields of Chadds Ford — something that was encouraged for him to build his strength. His father, N.C., was his only art teacher.
Andrew began painting with oils but moved to watercolors. Cronin said Andrew would later say of watercolors, “It’s my free side,” meaning he had more freedom with watercolors than with oils. But he later moved to egg tempera, which enabled him to give more detail in his work.
Andrew became more serious about art after his father’s untimely death in 1945, Cronin said. His painting, Winter 1946 shows a boy running down a hill. Andrew would later say it represented how he felt after his father was killed.
Cronin was running out of her allotted time so she was brief when discussing Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son. He was devoted to his wife Phyliss, who recently died, and a number of portraits and other pieces inspired by her and the relationship the two had are now on display at the Brandywine River Museum of Art.
She told one humorous story about Jamie’s self-portrait, Pumpkinhead, which shows a human male standing in a field with a pumpkin where his head should be. Cronin said Jamie had been accepted into the National Academy of Design. As part of being accepted, he was required to submit a self-portrait. He submitted Pumpkinhead, which was promptly rejected. Jamie then replaced it with a more standard image.
The adults-only reception Friday night saw a large crowd shopping for art among the more than 60 artists whose works were on display. Final figures were not available, b early reports were that sales were good. The PTO gets 30 percent of the proceeds from the sales.
About Rich Schwartzman
Rich Schwartzman has been reporting on events in the greater Chadds Ford area since September 2001 when he became the founding editor of The Chadds Ford Post. In April 2009 he became managing editor of ChaddsFordLive. He is also an award-winning photographer.
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