American · 1917–2009
Andrew Newell Wyeth (1917-2009) was an American realist painter whose work made him one of the most popular and most contested artists of twentieth-century American art. Born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the youngest child of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, he never attended formal art school, training instead under his father's demanding eye. He worked almost exclusively in a self-taught mastery of egg tempera and watercolor, painting the people and landscapes around his two home bases: the Brandywine Valley of Pennsylvania and the coast of Cushing, Maine. His 1948 tempera Christina's World, depicting a disabled neighbor crawling through a field toward a distant farmhouse, became one of the most recognized paintings in American art. In 1986 he revealed the Helga Pictures, a secret cache of roughly 240 works of a Chadds Ford neighbor, painted in private over more than a decade. Wyeth received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and the Congressional Gold Medal in 1990, even as critics repeatedly dismissed his precise, melancholic realism as sentimental illustration rather than serious modern art -- a divide his family's three-generation dynasty of painters, including his father and his son Jamie, has never fully resolved.