Displaying items by tag: N.C. Wyeth

The Shelburne Museum in Shelburne, VT has organized an exhibition that explores the use of extreme perspectives, unconventional angles and powerful narratives in works by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), his son, Andrew (1917-2009) and Andrew’s son, Jamie (b. 1946). Wyeth Vertigo presents nearly 40 works from one of the most influential families in modern American art.

Highlights include the Shelburne’s own monumental painting by Andrew Wyeth, Soaring (1942-1950), and 39 works on loan from institutions such as the Whitney Museum of American Art and Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts as well as from private collections including those of the Wyeth family. Thomas Denenberg, The Shelburne Museum’s director and co-curator of the show, said, “The exhibition expands our understanding of the work of each Wyeth, while tracing a key theme that unifies the generations. Imaginative, playful, thoughtful, somber – at times even magical, the work of the Wyeths tells the story of twentieth-century America.”

Wyeth Vertigo will be on view at the Shelburne Museum through October 31, 2013 and is complemented by an exhibition catalogue published by the University Press of New England.

The American art sale, which took place today, May 23, 2013 at Christie’s in New York, realized $50.8 million, the highest total that the category has seen since May 2008. 99 out of the 135 lots offered sold and 85% sold by value.

The auction’s top lot was Edward Hopper’s (1882-1967) oil on canvas painting Blackwell’s Island (1928), which brought $19.1 million (estimate: $15 million-$20 million). Hopper also took the sale’s second top spot with his watercolor on paper Kelly Jenness House (1932), which sold for $4.1 million (estimate: $2 million-$3 million) and set the auction record for a work on paper by the artist. The Hopper sales reinforced the artist’s continued popularity among buyers and the strong market demand for exceptional Modernist works.

A highly anticipated collection of six paintings by the Wyeth family of artists sold for upward of $2 million. The works by N.C. (1882-1945), Andrew (1917-2009), and Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946) were put up for sale by New Jersey-based businessman and avid collector of the Wyeths’ works, Eric Sambol. The highlight of the collection was N.C. Wyeth’s Norry Seavey Hauling Lobster Traps Off Blubber Island (1938), which garnered nearly $844,000.

Other significant sales from the auction included Norman Rockwell’s (1894-1978) Starstruck (1934), which brought over $2 million, exceeding its high estimate of $1.2 million, Georgia O’Keeffe’s (1887-1986) My Back Yard (1943), which was purchased by the Cincinnati Art Museum for $1.8 million (estimate: $1 million-$1.5 million), George Bellows’ (1882-1925) Splinter Beach (1913), which achieved $1.2 million (estimate: $500,000-$700,000), and Sanford Robinson Gifford’s (1823-1880) Tappan Zee (1879-80), which sold for $1.1 million (estimate: $200,000-$300,000).    

On April 26, 2013 Christie’s announced the sale of Three Generations of Wyeth: The Collection of Eric and Cynthia Sambol, which will take place on May 23, 2013 as part of its American Art auction in New York. Comprised of thirteen works – one by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), six by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), and six by Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946) – it is one of the largest collections of Wyeths Christie’s has ever sold.

Eric Sambol, a 53-year-old New Jersey businessman, became captivated by the work of Andrew Wyeth after a school trip to the Metropolitan Museum of Art in 1976 to see the exhibition Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons. Years later in 2000, after building an impressive collection of Hudson River School and maritime paintings, Sambol acquired his first Andrew Wyeth painting, Flat Boat. With the help of his wife Cynthia, a landscape designer, the couple’s collection grew to include works by Andrew’s father, N.C. Wyeth, and Andrew’s son, Jamie Wyeth.

Highlights from the collection include Andrew Wyeth’s Rocky Hill, an emotionally wrought watercolor of his dog Nell, which is expected to garner between $1.8 million and $2.4 million; Jamie Wyeth’s Lighthouse Dandelions, which draws on the family’s close connection to Maine and is expected to sell for $250,000-$350,000; and N.C. Wyeth’s Norry Seavey Hauling Traps Off Blubber Island, which was painted as a gift to Roger Scaife, a friend of the artist and editor at Houghton Mifflin and is expected to bring $300,000 to $500,000.    

On April 26, 2013 an exhibition featuring 30 paintings by N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945) will open at the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, ME; the works are being loaned by the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA

Every Picture Tells a Story: N.C. Wyeth Illustrations from the Brandywine River Museum spans four decades and includes Wyeth’s early western paintings, paintings that were used as illustrations for Robert Louis Stevenson books, and later works that boast a more experimental style. Wyeth, an American artist and prolific illustrator, divided his time between Pennsylvania’s Brandywine Valley and coastal Maine. The Farnsworth often highlights Wyeth’s Maine-related works.

Every Picture Tells a Story will be on view through December 29, 2013.

Andrew Wyeth’s ‘Ides of March:’ The Making of a Masterpiece is currently on view at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, PA. The exhibition is part of a five-year sequence of events that will culminate in 2017 with a centennial celebration of the realist painter Andew Wyeth (1917-2009), including a major retrospective of the artist’s work. A native of Chadds Ford, Wyeth was a prominent force in the art world during the mid-20^th century.

The privately owned Ides of March (1974), which is rarely exhibited, will be presented alongside more than 30 of Wyeth’s preliminary studies for the tempera painting. The exhibition offers viewers a rare glimpse into Wyeth’s painstaking approach to composition and his renowned use of evocative imagery.

Organizers hope that The Making of a Masterpiece and the museum’s future events will introduce Wyeth as well as his family members to a new crop of art enthusiasts. Wyeth’s father, N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), was a celebrated American artist and illustrator and his son, Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), is a well-known realist painter and heir to the Brandywine School of painters, which was created by his grandfather and father.

The Making of a Masterpiece will be on view at the Brandywine River Museum through May 19, 2013. Visitors of the museum can also take a tour of Wyeth’s studio now through November 19, 2013.

On March 4, 2013 the Philadelphia Museum of Art announced a number of important acquisitions that will enhance the institution’s European, Latin, and American art collections. The gifts came from various donors including collectors Roberta and Richard Huber, global healthcare company GlaxoSmithKline, and several Museum Trustees.

Among the recent acquisitions is Amaryllis Josephine, a double-page watercolor on vellum by Belgian painter and botanist Pierre Joseph Redouté (1759-1840). A pencil drawing of the flower’s bulb accompanies the watercolor. Both of the works were created as part of a series of engravings made under the patronage of the empress Joséphine, Napoleon Bonaparte’s first wife.

The museum also received four 18^th century paintings that are currently on view as part of the exhibition Journeys to New Worlds: Spanish and Portuguese Colonial Art from the Roberta and Richard Huber Collection (on view through May 19, 2013). The works include King Luis I of Spain on Horseback (unknown artist, Peru); Saint Anthony of Padua Preaching Before Pope Gregory IX (unknown artist Peru); The House at Nazareth (unknown artist, Bolivia); and Our Lady of the Reedbed or Irún with Donor, Captain Joaquín Elorrieta by Ecuadorian artist José Cortés de Alcocer.    

Other acquisitions include 236 photographs by pioneering modern photographer Paul Strand (1890-1976); N.C. Wyeth’s (1890-1976) Trial of the Bow, the first painting to enter the museum’s collection by the artist; and an early 20^th century stained glass and bronze chandelier by Tiffany Studios under the artistic direction of Louis Comfort Tiffany (1848-1933).

The Philadelphia Museum of Art will hold an exhibition of its recent acquisitions this summer.

The National Geographic Society is well known for its collection of photographs chronicling scientific exhibitions, explorations, archaeology, wildlife, and various cultures of the world. With 11.5 million photos and original illustrations in its collection, National Geographic will bring a small selection from the archive to Christie’s December auction. There will be 240 pieces spanning from the late 1800s to the present including photographs as well as paintings by artists such as Andrew and N.C. Wyeth. The National Geographic Collection: The Art of Exploration is expected to bring about $3 million on December 6. This marks the first time any of the institution’s collection has been sold.

While many of the works have never before been published or exhibited, a number of them are well known including Steve McCurry’s Afghan Girl that has a pre-sale estimate of $30,000 to $50,000. Other works include a 1969 illustration entitled A Blue Globe Hanging in Space–The Earth as Seen From the Moon by Charles Bittinger, a photo of a diver with an octopus taken by Jacques Cousteau, and The Duel on the Beach, a painting by N.C. Wyeth.

All proceeds from the auction will be put towards the promotion and preservation of the National Geographic archive as well as the young photographers, artists, and explorers who will guide the institution into the future.

 

“I am working so please do not disturb,” reads the block-lettered placard. “I do not sign autographs.”

This warning hangs on the door of an unassuming white clapboard house in Chadds Ford, Pa. It’s the house where Andrew Wyeth worked for nearly seven decades, producing many of the paintings that made him known as “America’s artist.” This summer, for the first time since his death in 2009 at 91, the studio is open for visitors.

Newell Convers (N. C.) Wyeth (1882–1945), the father of iconic American artist Andrew Wyeth, did his groundbreaking work during the golden age of illustration in the early twentieth century. Wyeth is perhaps best known for his illustrations that appeared in the novels of Robert Lewis Stevenson and James Fenimore Cooper and in popular magazines like the Saturday Evening Post, Scribner’s, and McClure’s.

Shortly after completing work for the 1919 reprint of Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans, Wyeth began to move away from illustration to focus on landscape, portraits, and still life paintings. He would occasionally reuse his old canvases, turning them upside down and painting over them, not to save money, but to be inspired by the colors and abstract shapes of the inverted composition while he painted.1 As a result, many of these illustrations, buried beneath later compositions, are known today only in their black and white reproductions in magazines and books.