American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists Featuring the Papageorge Family Collection

Although remembered as one of America’s foremost illustrators, Newell Convers Wyeth harbored special affection for the landscape. Torn between his commission work—for the likes of Scribner’s, Harper’s Monthly, and The Saturday Evening Post—and his desire to be a fine artist, Wyeth longed to create paintings “with a soul.” The rolling hills and Sycamore-studded environs of the Brandywine River Valley, where he settled with his wife in 1908, had a profound effect on him, as did coastal Maine. For Wyeth, these were places of consequence. Free from the limitations imposed by commercial projects, he was welcome to experiment, to audition different styles, and to produce a deeply personal body of work. Arguably the most resonant of his landscapes were of the area around Port Clyde, Maine, where the Wyeth family summered from 1920 onward. "Eight Bells," their low-slung sea captain's cottage at the tip of the St. George Peninsula, offered unobstructed views of the harbor–and of the adjacent Hupper property, as depicted in the present painting. At more than 48 x 40 inches, Jetty Tree exudes the freedom that Wyeth experienced in Maine. Executed in an unrestrained, impressionist style, and in a cool palette indicative of its coastal setting, the painting is relieved of the limitations imposed by plot and process. Rather, a stout apple tree and jetty take center stage; at right, a lobsterman hunches to inspect the day's catch. In the distance, through a late-afternoon haze, are the sylvan islands of Maine's Midcoast. Fresh-to-market after a long-term loan to the Brandywine Museum of Art, Jetty Tree has been featured in two important exhibitions–one devoted to Wyeth's landscapes and another that juxtaposed Wyeth's output with that of his grandson, Jamie. For the pair, even across generations, nature remained a creative nexus. Andrew Wyeth, the most prolific of the family's landscapists, dated the present work to 1936–the same year his father executed Bright and Fair (Eight Bells), one of his most significant Maine scenes. Satisfying a desire to create personally meaningful, soulful compositions, while offering a counterpoint to his commercial ventures, works like Jetty Tree occupy an important position within the elder Wyeth's oeuvre.