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Andrew Newell Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917. The youngest of five children of Newell Convers and Carolyn Bockius Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth was home-tutored and learned art from his father. In 1937 at age twenty, he had his first one-man exhibition of watercolors at Macbeth Gallery in New York City. The entire inventory of paintings quickly sold out, and Wyeth's career was launched.
In October 1945 Andrew Wyeth's father and his three-year-old grandson were killed when their car stalled on railroad tracks near their home and was struck by a train. Wyeth has referred to his father's death as a formative emotional event in his artistic career, in addition to a personal tragedy. It was shortly after this time that Wyeth's art consolidated into his mature and enduring style, characterized by a subdued color palette, highly realistic renderings, and the depiction of emotionally charged symbolic objects.
In 1948 Wyeth began painting Anna and Karl Kuerner, neighbors of the Wyeths in Chadds Ford. Ironically the Kuerner's farm is just a few yards from the railroad tracks where N.C. Wyeth died. The Kuerner's farm is now available to tour through the Brandywine River Museum. Like the Olsons in Maine, the Kuerners and their farm became one of Wyeth's most important subjects for nearly 30 years.
Dividing his time between Pennsylvania and Maine, Wyeth has maintained a relatively consistent realist painting style for over fifty years. He has tended to gravitate to several identifiable landscape subjects and models, to which he would return repeatedly over a period of decades. He typically creates dozens of studies on a subject in pencil or loosely brushed watercolor before executing a finished painting, either in watercolor, drybrush (a watercolor style in which the water is squeezed from the brush), or egg tempera. His works have fetched increasingly higher prices with his growing fame, and today Wyeth's major works can sell for in excess of one million dollars from private dealers and at auction.
In 1986, extensive coverage was given to the revelation of a series of 240 studies of Wyeth's neighbour, the Prussian-born Helga Testorf, painted over the period 1971-1985 without the knowledge of either Wyeth's wife or John Testorf, her husband.
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