N.C. Wyeth: Andrew Launches

"Charlie Ervine," 1937 by Andrew Wyeth

"In October 1932, at the age of fifteen, Andy entered his father's studio on Rocky Hill to begin his apprenticeship. He would have as his teacher a father who meant for his son to be the better craftsman. 'If you're not better than I am,' N.C. would tell Andy, 'I'm a rotten teacher.' He was the only teacher Andrew Wyeth would ever have.

Less than five years later, in early January 1936, Andy took examples of his work - twenty watercolors and two black-and-white drawings - to New York City. On his father's advice he left the portfolio at the Macbeth Gallery at 11 East Fifty-Seventh Street and went home. A response came quickly. Robert Macbeth, president of the gallery, believed that Andrew Wyeth had 'something quite new to offer.' He proposed to give Andy his first solo show later that year.

That summer N.C. reported to Macbeth, 'The boy is really aflame! A parent cannot, I suppose, judge dispassionately of his children, but I believe very deeply that Andy is headed toward splendid accomplishments.' With Andy he had been an altogether different teacher than he had for the older children. From the boy's first studies in perspective, through cast drawing and still-life painting and finally figure study and landscape in oil, N.C. had done everything he could to make himself invisible. He rarely altered Andy's work, as Pyle had done to young Wyeth and as N.C. had done to Henriette and Carolyn. Instead of drawing directly on Andy's pictures, he would make a sketch on Andy's paper - to demonstrate possibilities.

By the end of September 1937, Andy had forty-eight watercolors to send to his first New York exhibition. When the show opened in October, the family gather in excitement, little expecting what twenty-year-old Andrew Wyeth was about to do. By the morning of the second day, word had spread. Mrs. Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney had bought 'The Lobster Trap.' Individual collectors had bought three and four paintings at a go, and art dealers from all along the eastern seaboard were snapping up what was left. 

Doll & Richards, the Boston gallery that had given Winslow Homer his first one-man show of watercolors, booked Andy for the fall of 1938. When he reappeared in the gallery, on his way home to Chadds Ford that second afternoon, a red foil star gleamed on every frame: a complete sellout, a record for the gallery! N.C. himself was speechless when he heard the news. Stepping forward, he took his son in his arms and hugged him. The next day Andrew Wyeth went back to work in his father's studio, studying anatomy."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "N.C. Wyeth" by David Michaelis.)