The enthusiasm that Andrew and Betsy Wyeth had for American painting is demonstrated through their foundation, The Wyeth Foundation for American Art. Wyeth met many of those artists, such as Edward Hopper, during trips to New York or summer excursions to Maine and a number of others called on him in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. He was especially interested in those who had developed a personal style and expanded their range of possibilities. I got a direction that was authentic to me and to what I felt.”Īs his interest in watercolor expanded, so did Wyeth’s awareness of other great artists who used the medium, particularly those who used it as freely and expressively as he did. “I never wanted to copy the work of other people, but I wanted to find the truth in nature that they were expressing-and then find my own truth,” he is says in the book Andrew Wyeth: Early Watercolors, by Susan Strickler (Currier Museum of Art, Manchester, New Hampshire). He immediately began looking at the work of great watercolorists from the past, especially American artists who “lifted watercolor from the academic approach of the British and made it something freer,” he explained.Īmong the first historic artists to inform and influence young Wyeth was Winslow Homer (1836–1910), whose work he first saw when visiting Homer’s studio in Prouts Neck, Maine. Wyeth, and by one of his father’s friends, Sid Chase. Celebrating the Life and Art of Andrew WyethĪndrew Wyeth was first introduced to watercolor by his father, the famous illustrator N.C.

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