N.C. Wyeth: A Dynasty

"Christina's World" by Andrew Wyeth

"Carol Bockius Wyeth, N.C. Wyeth's wife, often said that she wished her life had ended with her husband's. In some ways, it did. She never learned to drive. She remained in her house with her linens and drying corsages and a growing collection of blond curls taken from the unshorn heads of Wyeth grandchildren. Yet 'unlike other grandmothers, her grandchildren never entirely engrossed her,' Henriette wrote. 'Mummy's life and excitements were all in and around Pa.' At the urging of her children, Carol left everything in the Homestead and the studio as it was. Everything became a relic. 

Life itself would go on. Twenty-five years passed. Yet the Homestead and the studio remained exactly as they had been on October 19, 1945. Scarcely visited by outsiders, overgrown, Rocky Hill became N.C. Wyeth's shrine. Even his place in 'The Robe,' the book he was reading the night before the collision, stayed marked at page 176. Carol died of a heart attack on March 15, 1973, a week before her eighty-seventh birthday.

As time went on, as three generations of Wyeth painters succeeded N.C., the Wyeths would remain in the public eye as a group. Treated in the national press as a ruling family, the Wyeths were always approachable in their villages; open, engaging, modest - ordinary people listed in the telephone directory.

Of home there was no letting go. One by one they would come to be buried beside Pa under the grave marker he had designed. As in Needham, a single stone marked the lives and deaths of the Wyeths, their individual birth years, initials, and terminal dates carved one below the next, the family reunited under one rock."

Wyeth Family of Artists: https://www.brandywine.org/museum/about/wyeth-family-artists

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