The Wyeths: Three Generations | Works from the Bank of America Collection

For three generations, the Wyeth family has created art that enraptures the imagination. The Wyeths: Three Generations presents more than sixty paintings, drawings and illustrations by N. C. Wyeth, his son Andrew and his grandson Jamie, along with works by N. C.’s daughter Henriette and her husband Peter Hurd. The works—from the early 1900s to the early 2000s—reveal the breadth of the Wyeths’ creative output and illuminate the artists’ distinctive styles, stories, and subjects, as well as shared themes across their careers.

Newell Convers Wyeth (1882–1945) has long been considered one of the nation’s leading artist-illustrators. Andrew Wyeth (1917–2009) remains one of the United States’ most popular artists, yet his paintings defy easy categorization, straddling the boundary between mundane and magical. Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946), like his father and grandfather, has painted the ambiguity and strangeness of everyday reality in rural Pennsylvania and the Midcoast of Maine.

Interspersed between the three sections that introduce N. C., Andrew, and Jamie individually are three more sections, which present the Wyeths in conversation. These thematic groupings underscore a common sensibility across generations yet also reveal how the Wyeths produced strikingly different pictorial worlds through their parallel range of artistic processes. In their portraits, through close study and an intimate sense of connection, the Wyeths capture the psychological intensity and individuality of their sitters. In their shared fascination with the ocean and the coastal culture of Maine, they combine careful observation with creative intuition to produce visionary views of seaside life. In images of the actual or imagined past, the Wyeths suggest their place within a history that is continually unfolding and the resolution of which is uncertain.

Across these groupings, we find a world of heightened realism that is simultaneously familiar and distant, approachable and fantastical. Each generation of Wyeth painters seems always mindful of their inheritance, whether artistic, familial, or historical. Their work is visual lore: a collage of knowledge and lingering memory, shared and passed down over time, rooted in places and people, teetering on the threshold of the visible and unseen.

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Exhibition opening, programming, and tour information are forthcoming.