The Wyeths: Three Generations

Press Release

The Soyer Bequest exhibition will feature around 20 paintings and works on paper by Moses and Raphael Soyer, Ben Shahn, Edward Hopper, Phillip Evergood, Elie Nadelman, Guy Pene du Bois, Joseph Stella, George Bellows, Abraham Walkowitz, and others, including Chaim Gross’s carved wood sculpture, Three Acrobats (1928). These works were donated by artist Moses Soyer and his wife, Ida, who greatly augmented the Montclair Art Museum’s collection in 1974 with a bequest of over 100 works, providing crucial representation of American figurative art between the wars.  For three generations, the Wyeths have created art that captures the imagination and admiration of a wide audience. This exhibition presents more than 60 paintings, drawings, and illustrations by N.C. (Newell Converse) Wyeth, his son Andrew Wyeth, and his grandson Jamie Wyeth. The works—from the early 1900s to the present—reveal the breadth of the Wyeth family’s creative output and illuminate both common themes within the works and the artists’ individual styles.

N.C. Wyeth (1882–1945) has long been considered one of the nation’s leading illustrators. In the early 1900s he studied with illustrator Howard Pyle in Delaware. In 1911, he build a house and studio in nearby Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Later, he bought a sea captain’s house in Maine and in 1931 built a small studio, which he shared with his son Andrew and his daughters. The exhibition includes illustrations for books by Robert Louis Stevenson and Washington Irving as well as historical scenes, seascapes, and landscapes.

Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917) is one of the United States’ most popular artists, and his paintings follow the American Realist tradition, which includes Winslow Homer. He has been influenced by the works of Homer, whose watercolor technique he admires, as well as by the art of Howard Pyle and his father, N.C. While Andrew paints recognizable images, his use of line and space often imbue his works with an underlying abstract quality. The exhibition includes important works from the 1970s and 1980s, as well as recent paintings.

Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), like his father and grandfather, has painted subjects of everyday life, in particular the landscape, animals, and people of Pennsylvania and Maine. In contrast to this father—who paints with watercolor, drybrush, and tempera—Jamie works in oil and mixed media, creating lush painterly surfaces. Eighteen paintings represent all periods of his career.

The exhibition is from the Bank of America Collection Traveling Exhibition Program.