N.C. WYETH
The Studio
c. 1911, oil on canvas, 16 x 20 in.
Photograph courtesy of Brandywine River Museum
Collection of Mr. and Mrs. Frank E. Fowler

Interior view of the studio, which Wyeth built after the success of his illustrations for Treasue Island, the first of the Seribmer classics.

World of the Wyeths
by David Michaelis
[From Condé Nast Traveler, April 1998]

Three generations of Wyeths have mined Pennsylvania's Brandywine Valley for some of the most memorable images ever produced.

On the eve of two of the largest Wyeth Exhibitions in more than a decade, David Michaelis canvasses the landscape to unearth a family's secret history— and the roots of its inspiration.

Summer twilight in the Brandywine Valley, not yet a star in the sky. Down a twisting lane thick with the lush black foliage of late June. All at once a broad meadow emerges alongside the road, tranquil and lovely, fenced on its far side by a formal line of trees. Beyond the trees rises the peak of a vast tent. Bright yellow party light transilluminates the white canvas. Some kind of reception is taking place, probably a wedding. But in this valley, where generations of du Ponts got rich on gunpowder, and generations of Wyeths got famous painting newborn calves and nudes in moonlight, you never know, at first, exactly what sort of spectacle you're witnessing.

I get out of the car to look. That's when I see the fireflies. There are fewer than six, blinking here and there in the grass. As the first wash of evening darkness spreads from the trees, the fireflies seem to multiply before my eyes, turning the scene dreamy, then surreal. In another ten minutes, the roadside pasture looks electrified. There are so many green sparks that I begin to suspect—and this is a thought you would find yourself thinking only in this valley—that someone has cultivated these insects. If there are beekeepers, why not firefly farmers? In the valley of the Brandywine, it would not be unusual to find that someone had raised ten thousand fireflies and turned them loose for the pleasure of a single summer night.

The Valley is tiny, as river valleys go, with a Swiss compactness and the small-world feel of the English countryside. Drive out from downtown Wilmington and you can be at the heart of the Brandywine in less than fifteen minutes. Thirty minutes farther along and you are well on your way to the streets of Philadelphia. Because of the size of the tree-lined river—never more than a hundred feet wide, sometimes no deeper than a pebbly stream—the valley's scale is always human.

Twenty miles north of Wilmington, the Brandywine River threads south over granite. Joining two contiguous worlds, the farmland of southeastern Pennsylvania and the Delaware Château Country, the Brandywine forms a single river valley that feels more like the upland part of an island than the lowland of an interstate river system. Somewhere out along Route 100, perhaps on the great arc surveyed by Mason and Dixon, an invisible line divides the Brandywine Valley from the rest of the East Coast megalopolis. A few miles outside Wilmington, the hills take over—wave-shaped swells, some of them reaching three hundred feet above sea level, undulating north in an almost oceanographic procession.

The hilltops here have houses on them—houses nine stories tall. These towering piles are set on palatial estates, their gardens awash in color, the grounds dotted with pedigreed cattle and horses. The Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Paul Horgan, visiting the valley in the 1930s, was amazed to find that "every hill has a great house filled with relatives and friends and they all know each other. They ride together—everyone keeps horses, and they play tennis and polo at home. " Another literary figure of that era, the legendary Scribner's editor Maxwell Perkins, wondered why the du Ponts "should have built such steep-walled, fort-like places, in so mild a climate." Heavily wooded now, fortressed against malls and suburban sprawl by land trusts and conservancies, the hills of the Château Country remind you that not long ago, some of the most lenient tax laws governing corporations anywhere in the world made this valley into a feudal court. The du Ponts in their hilltop castles took the role of the monarchy, and the Brandywine River all but functioned as a moat.

Winterthur, the crown jewel of Château Country, is built on the vast scale of Loire Valley estates. Surrounded by 985 acres of landscaped grounds, including sixty acres of display gardens and the eight-acre Azalea Woods, the mansion and life's work of Henry Francis du Pont looks as if it might contain a diamond as big as the Ritz. Behind the beige stucco facade are 175 period rooms through which a soft mid-Atlantic light plays over the silver, ceramics, textiles, and furniture in the world's foremost collection of American antiques—some 89,000 decorative objects in all. This is a true museum, the Smithsonian of the mid-Atlantic: No matter how many times you visit, you will never see everything.

Over the Pennsylvania line, the scene relaxes noticeably. It's like crossing from Vermont into New Hampshire: The crisp lines created by wealth begin to blur. Fences need mending. On fine October days, cornstalks stand messily drying in the sun. The air ripens with the smell of apples. Everything seems simple again. Glimpses of big fat beech trees and old stone farmhouses mingle with power lines and unpainted mailboxes: semirural America, reassuring and ordinary. Yet by the time you've recrossed the Brandywine, you have intruded into an odd, insular, sometimes enchanting, sometimes maddeningly self-referential world.

Two roads converge on the village of Chadds Ford: U.S. 1 and Pennsylvania's Route 100. The shoulderless state roadway narrows in places to the width of a single lane, plunging into deep gorges, veering through dark, sun-shot glades, as it follows the serpentine path of the Brandywine. Steel tracks knife across the road.

In Chadds Ford you are never far from the railway. Driving from Wilmington to Chadds Ford on Route 100, you cross no fewer than three sets of active tracks and drive parallel to a fourth. Even when you can't see trains, you feel them rumbling along, heavy with freight. Each day, morning and afternoon, the valley floor ripples underfoot.

When I first came to Chadds Ford in 1992 to write a biography of N.C. Wyeth, the tracks made me nervous. On October 19, 1945, the Ford station wagon in which Wyeth was driving with his three-year-old grandson collided with a Pennsylvania Railroad train that was passing through a grade crossing less than a mile from the Wyeth homestead. Both Wyeth and his grandson were killed. The first time I sat down to read Wyeth's letters, in a renovated gristmill alongside the Brandywine, a train whistle in the woods across the river literally made me jump in my chair.

When the young N.C. Wyeth arrived here in 1902 to study painting with Howard Pyle, two railroad lines cut across the heart of the valley. "This is a purely agricultural district," the Wilmington & Reading Railroad noted, "and has hitherto been mainly a grazing country." Wyeth noticed "big sad trees" and "succulent meadows" and "humble stone farmhouses" set among old dairy farms and Revolutionary War battlegrounds. He loved the valley immediately and with a passion that grew more intense each year. "I love that country so that I worship it," he wrote in 1908. "Those great, old trees that I learned to know so well last summer mean more to me than most human beings. I could just hug them! and I will!"

For Wyeth, the countryside around Chadds Ford was more than just paintable scenery. "My attachment to this place is beyond words," he wrote. " Among those misty gray hills of Chadds Ford, is that spirit which exactly appeals to the deepest appreciation of my soul." In 1911, with a $2,500 commission from Charles Scribner's Sons to illustrate Treasure Island, Wyeth bought land in Chadds Ford—an eighteen-acre hillside parcel on which he built a house and studio with a sweeping view of the valley. "I'm totally satisfied," he wrote, "that this is the little corner of the world wherein I shall work out my destiny ."

"The homestead," as N C. called it, became home and studio and workshop for two generations of Wyeths. Except for Nat, none of N.C. and Carol Wyeth's children went to college. As adults, all five lived on or near the Wyeth property. When they married and established places of their own, they made their homes and studios, without any pretension, in buildings that, like the family homestead, were institutions of eighteenth- or nineteenth-century life: a village schoolhouse, a waterwheel gristmill, a granary, a millhouse, a farmhouse; in Maine, a lighthouse and a sea captain's house; and in New Mexico, a ranch.

The two survivors among Wyeth's children still live in Chadds Ford. Andrew Wyeth, the youngest, at eighty, resides with his wife, Betsy, in a millhouse on the Brandywine and paints every day in his studio, within walking distance of his father's property. Ann Wyeth McCoy, a composer, widowed, lives a mile away. Until his death in 1990, Nat Wyeth, an engineer and the inventor of the plastic soda bottle, also lived about a mile from his father's house. Carolyn Wyeth, the second daughter, a painter, remained in the family homestead until she died in 1994. Henriette Wyeth Hurd, the oldest of the children and the only one to live her life and raise a family of painters outside the valley, persisted on the Hurd ranch in New Mexico until her death last year.

The Wyeths are representative of this valley because they embody its central quality. They are self-reliant, free from outside influence, dependent only upon each other and their own intergenerational traditions. Yet they have become skilled at exercising the kind of personal independence that in more rigid hands can turn to isolation. If you are an artist or inventor or scientist or landscape designer or preservationist or musician—or simply a farmer who can afford to live like Thomas Jefferson—there's a good chance you'll feel at home in the Brandywine Valley. At the same time, close yourself off in your own garden and you run the risk of growing alienated from the wider world.

The valley has a deeply ambivalent sense of its own privacy, much the way, in a fairy tale, a witch's exquisite but high-walled garden both attracts and repels outsiders. There is a reason for this, even beyond the fact that some of the valley's people are nearly as eccentric as the Grimm brothers' crones. One of the stock figures in fairy tales is the outsider, and the resistance that outsiders must overcome in such stories can be found here between visitors and locals every day.

The valley's visual art reinforces this quality. The Brandywine School of painting—sometimes described as magic realism—is naturalistic yet deliberately mysterious. Founded by the world-famous illustrator Howard Pyle as a response to the growing mechanization of the Gilded Age, the Brandywine tradition flourished in the early twentieth century under Pyle's pupil N.C. Wyeth, who elicited increasingly complex work from the line of painters who followed him in direct succession, including his sons-in-law Peter Hurd and John McCoy, his daughter Henriette, his celebrated son Andrew, and his daughter Carolyn, who gave the next generation's first prodigy, Jamie Wyeth, his first lessons in N.C.'s studio.

N.C. Wyeth's paintings portray scenes from well-known European folktales and adventure stories, climactic moments in American history, images from classic American prose and poetry, and seemingly simple subjects from rural life. Often labeled the greatest American illustrator, Wyeth burned to be "a painter who has shaken the dust of the illustrator from his heels!!" Again and again he vowed to spend half of his time painting and the other half illustrating. Frustrated as an easel painter, Wyeth bootlegged some of his best landscape painting into his illustrations. The skies in The Black Arrow, The Boy's King Arthur, and Robin Hood are not English; they are the mid-Atlantic skies over Chadds Ford. The trees of Wyeth's Sherwood Forest are not the ancient oaks of England but the sycamores and silver beeches of the Brandywine. The thorn tree in King Arthur was adapted from a tree that stood atop Wyeth's property in Chadds Ford, and the silver beech roots and rock outcroppings behind which Robin Hood and his men lay in ambush in Robin Hood are the roots and rocks of the hill on which Wyeth lived and worked.

N.C. painted the landscape of the valley into books because he could paint it nowhere else. While illustrating Rip Van Winkle and The Scottish Chiefs, he wrote: "If it wasn't that I was enabled to pour snatches of sunlight and shadow, storm or moonshine, into my [illustrations], I could never stand the strain." The bootlegging paid off. Wyeth's method of incorporating the Brandywine Valley landscape into the narratives of world literature elevated his work above all other illustrations then being published. Robert Frost recognized Wyeth's "strong bent toward the near, the homely, and the American" and wrote in 1917 to enlist him as an illustrator for his next collection of poems.

The next two generations of Wyeth artists would reverse the method. Instead of putting nature and landscape into storytelling images, Andrew Wyeth, and later Jamie Wyeth, encoded their work with narrative elements taken from life in the valley.

Less than a mile from Chadds Ford, off busy U.S.1, a country road proceeds east past unused meadows. Ring Road, named for the farmer who once lived here, rises through a glade, all at once lifting you up and over asphalted railroad tracks. Next, you pass on the left a putty-colored farmhouse with a red barn and a spruce-lined cattle run. On the right stands a big hill with some pines on its crown. Around a slight curve, a tiny church graveyard lies alongside the road. Behind it, at the corner of Ring and Bullock roads, there is an octagonal-shaped stone ruin.

Apparently simple sites: a now-defunct grade crossing of the Octoraro Branch of the Pennsylvania Railroad; the farm of a family named Kuerner; a slope called Kuemer's Hill; and the ruins of Mother Archie's Church at Archie's Corner. From these homely places along a narrow country lane have emerged some of the more complex and familiar works of art painted by the best-known American artist of his generation, Andrew Wyeth. Triple distilled through landscape, autobiographical events, and the inner life of the artist, Andrew Wyeth's Kuemer paintings, with their luminous slopes and hills, their love of white, and their use of dark, abstracted shapes, look as much like Switzerland as southeastern Pennsylvania. They are images from a Germanic world. They seem to have been painted at a higher altitude, in an atmosphere of purity.

On my first visit to Chadds Ford, I drove by Kuemer's Hill three times before realizing it was Kuerner's Hill. I was like Jonathan Winters in Stanley Kramer's 1963 comedy It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World, running crazily under the double-crossed trunks of palm trees, unaware they spelled out a big W. I was looking that morning for a yellow road sign. Andrew Wyeth's 1985 tempera Ring Road depicts the road under fresh snow; a bright yellow sign with a black arrow points the way around a curve. Knowing that many of Andrew Wyeth's paintings are encoded, I had a hunch that if I found that sign and followed that arrow, it would lead me somewhere important—perhaps to Kuemer's Hill, although I did not yet understand its full significance in Wyeth iconography.

It appears in Snow Flurries (1953) as the hill at the center of world, a kind of axis mundi. In Spring (1978), Karl Kuemer's dying body lies suspended in a tomb of snow on the side of the hill; another snow tomb is higher up the hill, but we don't know who's buried in that one. In Trodden Weed (1951), we see only the artist's feet; we don't know that he's recovering from a near fatal operation or that as he struggles to regain his artistic footing, he wears a pair of boots that once belonged to his father's teacher, Howard Pyle. We only know that he's walking through a field in a pair of archaic-looking boots, with Kuemer's Hill in the far background. The hill appears in pencil and dry-brush studies like Kuemer's Hill (1945), in the watershed work Winter 1946, and in the artist's summing-up masterwork, Snow Hill (1989), in which each of his most important models dances around a maypole atop the now-magical snow-covered hill.

I had read that Andrew Wyeth once revealed that Kuerner's Hill represents his father in his art; that the curve of the hill suggests the rise and fall of his father's chest breathing. Still, I couldn't help wondering how, of all the hills in the valley, this particular one had come to stand for N.C. Wyeth.

Driving along Ring Road that first morning, I saw all at once that the black arrow in the yellow road sign was pointing around the bend and down the road to the site of N.C. Wyeth's death. I had stopped instinctively before a dip in the road, and now, right underneath my car, ran the railroad tracks on which, at 9:17 on the morning of October 19, 1945, a three-ton steam engine collided with the station wagon that N.C. Wyeth had been driving up Ring Road. The Ford had stalled on the tracks, and Wyeth and his grandson had been unable to get out in time.

That winter, Andrew Wyeth, twenty-eight years old, returned again and again to the railroad crossing. Transformed by shock, he glimpsed the familiar world of the crossing with new eyes. The site of his father's death was surrounded by people and places he had known all his life and yet, until the winter of 1945-46, had never seen. The rock-jawed German farmer Karl Kuerner brought his father back to life. The big rounded hill across Ring Road from Kuerner's farm took on qualities of N.C.'s physical presence. One day that winter, Andrew caught a glimpse of a neighbor's son running, nearly out of control, down the massive slope of Kuerner's Hill. He painted Winter 1946: a portrait of the boy as his surrogate—traumatized, disoriented, lost on the hill.

From 1946 on, Andrew all but moved in with Karl and Anna Kuerner at their farmhouse. He kept works in progress in upstairs rooms for months at a time. He met his future model, the German-born Helga Testorf, when she was nursing Karl Kuerner through leukemia. Helga too lived in the neighborhood of the crossing. The pivotal point in Andrew Wyeth's life and art, Winter 1946 was a projection, as a map is a projection, of the whole world of his future work. From that tempera on—in portraits, figure studies, and landscapes painted in and around the Kuerner farm, including Karl (1948), Brown Swiss (1957), and the dozens of dry-brush and tempera works that made up the infamous "Helga Pictures"—Andrew painted everything he saw through the lens of his father's absence. "His death was the thing that really brought me to life," said Andrew, later adding, "It gave me a reason to paint, an emotional reason. I think it made me."

Starting in 1967, the painter George A. Weymouth played a major role in rallying the valley's wealth to the cause of land conservation. Singlehandedly, Weymouth's Brandywine Conservancy preserved the countryside found in Wyeth art, as well as the paintings themselves. The work—hundreds of illustrations, landscapes, still lifes, interiors, portraits, nude figure studies—can be seen in Chadds Ford, in rotation, on three floors of the Brandywine River Museum, a renovated nineteenth-century brick gristmill. Henriette Wyeth's portraits of her sister Carolyn and of Andrew and Betsy Wyeth are among her most sympathetic. Peter Hurd's luminous A Wet Night at the Roundup (1973) shows how suitable the ancient medium of egg tempera is for the light of the Southwest. Carolyn Wyeth's work is represented by the haunting Dark Shore (1933) and Deep Summer (1956); her brooding portrait of the Wyeth homestead, Up from the Woods (1974), is the kind of painting that permanently changes one's view of its subject: I never looked at the house or its inhabitants in the same way again.

Carolyn's star pupil, her nephew Jamie Wyeth, left school after the sixth grade and committed himself to a life of painting, achieving an early mastery of oil portraiture and watercolor landscape that has deepened over the years. Jamie Wyeth approached the valley from the inside out. He saw crocodiles in shattered tree limbs and abstract forms in buzz saw blades, and he found pathos in cows numbered for milking. His reach extends beyond barnyard and field, encompassing penetrating portraiture of such world figures as Nureyev and Warhol, and village types as universal as the people of Van Gogh's Arles. His new technique of mixing ground glass into pigment has brought an unusual radiance to his latest paintings, especially Portrait of Vulture (1997), in which the predator dramatizes the vulnerability of the green, sunlit valley below.

In the same way that making a pilgrimage to the geography around Kuerner's Hill helps explain what's hidden in Andrew Wyeth's paintings, an excursion to the Wilmington Library reveals something about N.C. Wyeth that no museum—not even the artist's studio—ever could.

The day after his death, the Washington Evening Star noted, "Thousands of people admired his achievements without comprehending why they were good." That lack of comprehension is the story of N.C.'s life. It still lingers in public places where his paintings seem almost to hang unseen.

The Wilmington Library, a stone edifice with the names of disciplines such as science and philosophy chiseled into its facade, stands catercorner to the Hotel du Pont in downtown Wilmington. The first time I stopped in, it didn't seem a very promising place for scholarly research. There was heavy security, fluorescent lights, gray metal shelves holding bundles of best-sellers and cheap romance novels. When I asked a reference librarian about local genealogies, she directed me to a locked-up research room. Offhandedly she added, "Oh, I think we have some pictures by one of the Wyeths—upon the second floor."

Some pictures. There in the reference room, high over the heads of the all-day readers of Hot Rod magazine, hung fourteen of the seventeen canvases that N.C. Wyeth painted in 1920 to illustrate Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, along with the jacket painting, title page, and endpaper design. Here was Crusoe on his raft, the ocean sky piled high with salmon-colored sunset clouds; Crusoe flinging his arms into the air, a turbulent sea behind him (according to Andrew Wyeth, the publishers cut this image, on the grounds that it was too scary for children). Here was one of the most famous pictorial moments in literature: Crusoe, "thunderstruck," as he first comes across a human footprint in the white sand at water's edge.

I, too, was thunderstruck. The freshness and vitality of Wyeth's brushwork and colors—blues, lavenders, pinks—was undimmed by the years. Wyeth painted the elements to express the idea of sustained exposure: not only exposure to obvious extremes (sun, wind) or to exotic perils (wild animals, cannibals) but also to time and to the unforeseen terrors of nothingness. Not even the glaring fluorescent monotony of Wilmington's public library could diminish the blazing island sunlight I remembered from my first childhood reading, or the iconic force of Crusoe's shock at finding himself not alone.

The eeriest thing of all was that no one seemed to take any notice. Here in the public library, one of the most accessible spaces in town, was one of the finest complete works by an American master, hidden in plain sight.