 N.C.
Wyeth
The Wyeth family has painted in Maine since Newell Convers ("N.C.")
Wyeth (1882-1945) brought his family to the small fishing harbor of Port
Clyde in 1920. After ten years of short vacations in the area, the family
moved into a modest, renovated, New England cape in 1930. Named 'Eight
Bells', after the well-known painting by Winslow Homer, the cape overlooked
the island-dotted Muscongus Bay to the open sea.
For N.C., Maine provided a seasonal respite from the ever-increasing
demands of commercial illustration and the opportunity to pursue his private
painting interests. Indeed, many of his best known "pure" paintings,
such as Island Funeral and Bright and Fair (Eight Bells) depicts scenes
in and around Port Clyde.
 Andrew
Wyeth
The son of the famous illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew achieved national
recognition in 1940, when at the age of twenty-three he became the youngest
member ever elected to the American Watercolor Society.
Around 1940 Wyeth began painting in the early Renaissance medium of egg
tempera, which was popularized by Wyeth, George Tooker, Jared French,
and other American realists who painted disquieting, sometimes surrealistic
scenes evoking the spiritual malaise and uncertainty of the era. Throughout
his career, Wyeth's reputation has centered around paintings such as Christina's
World (1948; Museum of Modern Art) which pair a startlingly realistic,
detailed technique and seemingly straightforward subjects with a vaguely
unsettling and enigmatic aura.
Andrew Wyeth was born in 1917 has spent nearly every summer of his life
in Maine, first in Port Clyde and after his marriage to Betsy James, in
Cushing.
Wyeth's most celebrated Maine paintings remain the elegiac Olson House
cycle, begun in 1939 and continuing until Christina Olson and her brother,
died.
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