Last year, the family, as the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, released about 7,000 works into the care of the Brandywine Museum and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, two museums representing the locations where Wyeth drew creative inspiration for his entire, eight-decade practice. Wyeth died in 2009 and his wife Betsy, who managed his career and stewarded his legacy, died in 2020. “There are some startlingly abstract and strange compositions in this show.”

“In these incredible, intimate, powerful watercolors, he was taking up abstraction when it served his goals,” he said. Coleman is the first Wyeth Foundation Curator at the Brandywine Museum of Art, overseeing more than 7,000 objects from the Wyeth family’s private collection, most of which have never been exhibited before.

“One of the not-so-secret agendas of this exhibition is getting beyond the received wisdom that Andrew Wyeth was fundamentally conservative, backwards looking, anti-modernist,” said curator Will Coleman, who directs the Andrew and Betsy Wyeth Study Center. It shows Wyeth, generally regarded as a realist who painted gritty, melancholic scenes of rustic American life, as a modern abstract artist. Several previously unexhibited paintings, drawings, and watercolors are now on view in “Andrew Wyeth: Home Places” at the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford, Pa. It is also interesting that Wyeth titled the painting Master Bedroom and depicted the dog at the center of the bed with its head on the pillow.The iconic works of Andrew Wyeth are some of the most recognizable American paintings of the 20th century, but much of that work has never been seen. The scene invokes a sense of fantasy and dreaminess in viewers.

Wyeth uses light and shadows to distinguish the passing of time which seems to highlight the simplicity of a dog’s life. Although there is only the window, the bed and the dog, a cozy, comfortable aura emanates and encompasses the observer. The sunlight streams through the small window into the dim room and casts shadows on the blanketed bed. Master Bedroom depicts a dog lying curled up on a bed in a peaceful afternoon slumber. Most artists have a stand-out piece that gains acclaim for touching people for Andrew Wyeth, Master Bedroom is that timeless piece. In almost all of Andrew Wyeth’s work, there is gentleness and serenity, a tender simplicity like the touch of a butterfly wing against your cheek on a breezy summer’s day.

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