Chadds Ford, Pa., Is Both Home and Muse for the Wyeths
By David A. Taylor
Special to The Washington Post
Wednesday, May 30, 2001
Your eyes have been to Chadds Ford, even if your feet have not. Stand here, and even if you don't specifically recognize these luminous fields, with their gauzy play of slope and light and fence and river, your memory will link them to a certain timeless ideal of Eastern American countryside. And if you know a bit about painters, you may already associate these stone walls and rustic shades with a single family -- the Wyeths. For three generations, Chadds Ford has been the backdrop to the art of the Wyeth clan, one of America's most prolific and influential artistic dynasties.
The Wyeths -- from progenitor N.C. to son Andrew to grandson Jamie -- are the pride of Chadds Ford, Pa., and the Brandywine River Valley. This terrain has inspired them through almost a century of illustration, landscape and portraiture. And they, in turn, have made these rolling fields as familiar in American art as the Western vales of Bierstadt or the Hudson scenes of Thomas Cole.
But these placid pastures, rendered in oil, belie some tempestuous scenes behind the easel. If you tour the studio of the great illustrator N.C. Wyeth, which is preserved much as it was when he died in 1945 and is open to the public, you can see the lantern-style slide projector that N.C. used to transfer mural designs from his drawings onto wall-sized canvases. What the tour guide doesn't mention is the night in 1945 when N.C.'s son Nat came to help his father. According to David Michaelis's biography of N.C. Wyeth, Nat arrived -- his job was to operate the projector -- and found his father alone in the studio, face smeared with bright lipstick. Nat recognized his own wife's shade of red, confirming what had been an open secret: a wartime affair between his wife, Carolyn, and his father. When Nat confronted him, the old man's only response was a comment on the weather.
"I don't know if I would have been that crazy about him as a person," says Jamie Wyeth, 55, of his grandfather N.C. "He was sort of bigger than life. He wanted to be the center of attention."
We're standing in that very studio. Jamie Wyeth agreed to meet here for an interview as he prepares a new exhibition that will include both his paintings and his grandfather's at the nearby Brandywine River Museum. That exhibit, "One Nation: Patriots and Pirates Portrayed by N.C. Wyeth and James Wyeth," makes a fine excuse for a trip to this tiny burg just north of Wilmington, Del. It's also a chance for a Wyeth fan like me to see firsthand the countryside that defines the family art and the studio where much of it was created.
You reach the studio by shuttle bus from the nearby museum, a quarter-mile away. It's nestled into a slope above a meadow. From the front door, you look down a flagstone path to the Wyeth family house and beyond to the fields and rooftops of Chadds Ford. The town is a wide spot on Route 1 along the Brandywine River, marked by the museum, a yellow Sunoco sign, a diner, a post office, an old inn, and a few shops and businesses. Within view are many patches of landscape that have made it into Wyeth paintings. The sycamores outside the studio appeared in N.C.'s Sherwood Forest for his illustrations of "Robin Hood" (never mind that sycamores aren't found in England). Not far away, if you drive along Ring Road, you'll pass Kuerner Farm, which Jamie's father, Andrew Wyeth, painted hundreds of times.
Inside the studio, the high Palladian windows allowed Wyeth the elder to work by a painter's preferred northern light (less glare) before the place was wired for electricity in 1923. Like an early film gaffer, N.C. adjusted his lighting with curtains in the window. On this spring morning, the light pours into the airy, vaulted space. The floorboards are worn and the stucco hearth is blackened from decades of fires. On the easel sits the painting of George Washington that N.C. was working on when he died. His palette, thickly encrusted with oils, lies beside it. Nearby hangs his smock, also slathered. The props include a Pueblo drum, a stuffed river otter and, suspended high above us, a birchbark canoe that N.C. bought from Penobscot Indians in 1937.
Whatever reservations Jamie Wyeth has about his grandfather's personal behavior, the old man's work space still gives him a painterly thrill. "There's a great mood in here," he says. "Don't you feel it? It still smells like it always did, too . . . cutlasses and cattle."
When Jamie Wyeth was a boy, the studio's back room was stuffed with stacks of the old man's canvases. "I'd come up here when I was 7 or 8 and just pore through those paintings," he says. "Just sit there and look and study these things. That, to me, was almost the most vital part of my education. The life jumping out of those things, it was just overwhelming to me."
Later, his Aunt Carolyn, who lived in the family home most of her life and painted in her own studio, gave Jamie painting lessons here. "I remember watching her squeeze oil paint onto her palette," he says. "I could just eat it, I loved the look of it so much."
Jamie's oils quickly gained notice. A first retrospective of his works came before his 30th birthday, and now many of them have joined the several Wyeth collections at the Brandywine River Museum.
Housed in an old stone mill, the museum uses the valley setting to scenic advantage. A wide wall of glass between galleries overlooks the sleepy stream. The three floors feature traveling exhibits and selections from the permanent collection. Along with Wyeths, there are works by Howard Pyle -- a master of American illustration who brought N.C. Wyeth to Chadds Ford -- and some of Pyle's other students, including Maxfield Parrish, Frank Schoonover and Jessie Wilcox Smith. Outside, the occasional canoeist floats down the Brandywine.
Wyeth says he was skeptical when the museum first approached him about a show on patriot painting. But he says he grew more interested when the idea evolved into juxtaposing his grandfather's early-20th-century optimism with the more shadowed, cynical view of the younger Wyeth's generation, which came of age in the 1960s. Jamie's sketches, for example, include some of the notorious figures at the eye of the Watergate trials. Compare those to posters that N.C. painted to sell war bonds during two world wars.
Wyeth says he's intrigued by the mixture of rogue and revolutionary in the exhibit, sometimes in the same portraits. "I think it's a uniquely American thing," he says. "A lot of our patriots are partly pirates. Today, people's sense of George Washington is a man in a powdered wig. But if you read about him, he was vital and competitive and just very tough. He had some wonderful pirate sides."
That two-sided toughness also appears in his grandfather's painting, Wyeth says. The old man's pirates were no cuddly eccentrics. "They're kind of ugly," he says. "The pirates in 'Treasure Island' are certainly not wonderful-looking and swashbuckling. They're grimy. That's why I think they still resonate."
Wyeth learned how clearly his grandfather's distinctive pictures still resonate at an opening of N.C.'s paintings at the New York Public Library. An octogenarian grabbed Jamie's hand and said, "Oh, Mr. Wyeth, I'm so thrilled to finally meet you! I was raised on your illustrations of 'Treasure Island.' " "I thanked her very much," he says. "She must have thought the fountain of youth was in Chadds Ford."
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