Long esteemed for his extraordinary Realist vision and straightforward subject matter, Andrew Wyeth is arguably the most popular living painter in the United States. The son of illustrator and painter Newell Convers Wyeth (1882-1945), the artist was born in 1917 in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania. He studied drawing and painting under his father, and, inspired by the watercolors of Winslow Homer (q.v.), he developed an early realist style akin to that of the nineteenth-century master. Not long afterward, Wyeth began to paint in the traditional medium of egg tempera, creating works of exacting verisimilitude. Both his watercolors and temperas attracted attention from the start, and from the time of his first New York show at age twenty-two, Wyeth has remained in the forefront of contemporary Realist painting.

Following the untimely death of his father at a railroad crossing in 1945, Wyeth began to infuse his work with a somber and enigmatic quality that has persisted throughout his career. In the years after World War II, the artist focused much of his attention on two families, the Kuerners in Pennsylvania and the Olsons in Maine. Admiring their simplicity and tenacity, Wyeth celebrated them in numerous well-known canvases, including the iconic Christina's World, purchased by the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1949. Despite (or perhaps because of) the bleakness of much of his work, Wyeth became something of a celebrity following the sale of Christina's World, and he enjoyed widespread popularity through the heyday of Abstract Expressionism in the 1950s. With the broader revival of figurative painting beginning in the 1960s, Wyeth has become more popular than ever. One of the small number of living artists to be accorded a retrospective at the Metropolitan Museum of Art (in 1976), Wyeth gained added notoriety in the 1980s following the unveiling of a series of portraits known as the Helga Pictures. Wyeth continued to paint and exhibit his work until his death in 2009 at the age of 91.

The Currier's Spindrift is a relatively early example of the egg tempera paintings for which the artist is today best known. Like many of Wyeth's works, the subject is impressively "real" and deceptively simple in appearance: grounded on a gravelly Maine beach, a sturdy dory is seemingly mocked by the darting swallow in the lower left. Yet the monochromatic cast of the painting as well as its insistent focus on the central object give the work an iconic austerity that argues for a deeper meaning.

The significance of Spindrift, however, is elusive. On one level, the artist has stated that the painting is a kind of portrait, in this case, of Maine lobsterman Henry Teel. According to Wyeth, "Henry Teel would come in from hauling lobster pots about 10:30 in the morning, pull his dory up on the beach, stow his oars and tackle neatly, and go indoors to cook himself a meal. This is a portrait of Henry without showing the man himself: these are all the things he used, shaped by his life and by the sea."(1) Yet the spare handling and almost immaculate quality of the subject imply a higher meaning. Painted only a few years after the death of the artist's father, Wyeth's image of an empty boat may serve on some level as a memorial to a beloved parent. In many cultures, ships and boats serve as metaphoric bearers of the soul to an afterlife; here, the inclusion of a swallow, an ancient symbol of Christ's Resurrection, lends further support to the idea. On a more general level, the rise and fall of the tide (here it is unclear whether the tide is coming in or going out) suggest universal cycles of death and rebirth.

"Spindrift" is a nautical term describing spray blown from the sea by ocean winds. It is also a name frequently given to ships and seaside hostelries. For Wyeth, its meaning may embody any number of associations. In the context of his father's death, it is perhaps evocative of dissolution and the evanescence of life.

Spindrift was painted during the summer of 1950 and purchased by the Currier Museum of Art shortly afterward. Today it holds a place among paintings by Winslow Homer, Thomas Eakins (q.v.) and Edward Hopper (q.v.) as one of the Museum's premier examples of American Realism.

VSD

NOTE

1. Andrew Wyeth quoted or paraphrased in Andrew Wyeth (ex. cat. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1966), p. 34, cat. 39.

REFERENCES

Andrew Wyeth. Ex. cat. Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, 1966.

Wanda M. Corn. The Art of Andrew Wyeth. Ex. cat. Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 1973.