(top)
HOWARD PYLE
Marooned
c. 1909, oil on canvas, 40 x 60 in.
Delaware Art Museum, Museum Purchase, 1912.

(middle)
N.C. WYETH
The Wreck of the "Covenant"
c. 1913, oil on canvas, 41¾ x 33¾ in.
Brandywine River Museum, Bequest of Mrs. Russell G. Colt.

(bottom)
ANDREW WYETH
Spring
c. 1978, egg tempera on panel, 24 x 48in.
Brandywine River Museum, Anonymous Gift.

The Wyeth Homestead in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Photo taken during the summer of 1941.

Keys to the Brandywine Valley
by David Michaelis
[From Condé Nast Traveler, April 1998. Check websites for current prices.]

Midway between New York City and Washington, D.C., the Brandywine Valley is the perfect weekend getaway. Take Amtrak's Metroliner or Acela to the one stop on the line you probably never got off at before for fun: Wilmington.

Lodging

The Brandywine River Hotel is a pleasant, serviceable place to stay in Chadds Ford, although it lacks the charm and outdoor activities of smaller nearby inns and B&Bs. My favorites among the 40 recently renovated rooms of varying sizes are No.217, with two double beds and a view in winter of the cupolaed barn where N.C. Wyeth painted Treasure Island, and No.208, a suite. One advantage here is that you're in the village, with barn shops and fine dining at the Chadds Ford Inn next door. Be aware, however, that after-museum-hours Chadds Ford can be confining: You can't walk on Routes 1 or 100 (phone and fax, 610-388-1200: doubles, $125~$135, including breakfast and afternoon tea).

Wilmington has been a one-hotel town since 1913, and the Hotel du Pont is it—a great white-gloved institution in the tradition of New York's Plaza and the Boston Ritz-Carlton. Updated with a well-equipped gym and a VCR in each of its 217 guest rooms, the Du Pont strives for old-fashioned five-star service at every turn. The Green Room for breakfast is pure Theodore Dreiser; at dinner in the Brandywine Room, you'll see one of N.C. Wyeth's great paintings, Island Funeral, hanging over the fireplace, flanked by notable works by his descendants. One caveat about the Du Pont: There's no fresh air in the bedrooms; you can't open the windows even one inch (302-594-3100, fax -3108; doubles, $149-$289; handicap-accessible).

The Inn at Montchanin Village, listed on the National Register of Historic Places, offers 27 guest rooms and suites that "have been restored with the sophisticated traveler in mind." While all rooms include luxurious baths, a wet bar, and fresh flowers, each maintains its own personality. The inn also boasts a fine dining restaurant, Krazy Kat's, that features an outstanding wine list, new American cuisine, and eclectic yet elegant decor (800-COW-BIRD, 302-888-2133).

The Fairville Inn is a first-class countryside alternative to the Hotel du Pont, with 15 well-fumished guest rooms in the main house, carriage house, and springhouse. Several carriage house rooms and suites have working fireplaces. Best of all, the windows open, so you can smell the woods and fields. In fact, the inn is so popular that standing reservations, made years in advance, can create difficulties for newcomers trying to book (610-388-5900, fax -5902; doubles, $140--$195).

Dining

N.C. Wyeth and two of his children dined on lobster and champagne at the Chadds Ford Inn on V -J Day, and several generations of Wyeths still come to the 18th-century inn to celebrate by candlelight. It's been Chadds Ford's one really good place to go since 1736, but there's nothing stuffy about it. The bar in the tavern has real village gossip and a great selection of ales and local suds. The dining rooms have a lived-in atmosphere, with a terrific char-grilled rib eye steak and excellent fish and fowl. There are plenty of Wyeth reproductions on the walls, but don't miss the one work that in some ways is most characteristic of Andrew Wyeth: a banderole drawing of Lafayette and Washington that the artist created especially for the inn's menu— a typically Wyethesque gesture of loyalty to home and village and history—which the nice people at the inn will let you take home (610-388-7361; entrées, $16-$25).

The Gables in Chadds Ford, a new competitor to the inn for lunch, dinner, and Sunday brunch, has succeeded in attracting a wide following among valley regulars. Superb starters on a large, full menu feature a local mushroom soup and a nicely done crab cake with seared scallops and coconut sauce; Thai-marinated grouper and yellowfin tuna au poivre are more notable main courses (610-388-7700; entrées, $16-$23; closed Mondays).

Serving truckers, museum curators, hometown Wyeths, and out-of-town journalists, Hank's Place is such an integral part of the Chadds Ford gestalt that if it were to vanish it would be an even greater loss to this era than the razing of Gallagher's general store was to old Chadds Ford. At breakfast, try the blueberry pancakes and the last word in eggs Benedict; at lunch, the Portobello mushroom burger with fries and extra-crisp coleslaw:; for dinner, the homemade meatloaf with mashed potatoes, gravy, and vegetable, or Hanks own Pennsylvania Dutch potpie (610-388-7061; entrées, $3.50-$7.95).

Sightseeing

The Wyeths aren't the only show at the Brandywine River Museum. Traveling exhibitions of the first rank fill whole floors, and permanently held works by nineteenth-century American landscapists, such as Asher Durand, Jasper Cropsey, and William Trost Richards, alongside trompe l'oeil master William Harnett, are in themselves worth the trip. In addition to a cafeteria that's open for lunch, there's an excellent museum shop, one of the best of its kind (610-388-2700). For tours of the N.C. Wyeth Studio (restored to its appearance at the time of his death in 1945) as well as limited access to portions of the newly restored Wyeth Homestead, a shuttle bus leaves the museum at hourly intervals in season (610-388-2700).

The works of Howard Pyle and the English Pre-Raphaelites (Edward Burne-Jones, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, William Holman Hunt, and John Everett Millais) are the twin cornerstones of the Delaware Art Museum in Wilmington. Pyle still stands as the city's "one real artist," and visitors who know little of the illustrator often love his paintings on sight. The Pre-Raphaelite collection is perhaps the most extensive of its kind in America. Beautifully hung on rasberry-colored high-Victorian walls, Rossetti's thick-maned, rapturous beauties look as much at home in this corner of the valley as Pyle's red-sashed pirates (302-571-9590).

The 1,050-acre Longwood Gardens estate near Kennett Square, Pennsylvania, where Pierre Samuel du Pont, the family head, once lived, has the peculiarly grandiose quality that the du Ponts gave to this valley. How else to explain 11,000 different species of flowering plants and shrubs and trees, fountains with 600 spouting jets, water lilies six feet in diameter, and four-times-a-year "Fireworks and Fountains" extravaganzas set to orchestral music such as Wagner's Ring Cycle (610-388-1000).

-David Michaelis