American Art

The Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center of the Brandywine Museum of Art confirms that this object is recorded in Betsy James Wyeth’s files.

Provenance:

The Artist

Nicolas Wyeth, the Artist's son

Acquired from the above by the present owner, 1986

Exhibited:

An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art: N.C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth, 1987, no. 178, pp. 150; 204 (traveling exhibition)

Lot note:

With its model ships and oil lamp set on a white painted mantel and dark fireplace below, Two Masters,1986, evokes childhood memories of Andrew Wyeth, as well as the sometimes difficult relationship he had with his father, the artist N.C., whom he both worshiped and feared. As stated in a 1986 letter from Nicolas Wyeth, Andrew’s son, to the present owner, Andrew painted the present watercolor in the living room of N.C. Wyeth’s summer home, called “Eight Bells,” in Port Clyde, Maine. According to Nicolas, the fireplace is one around which N.C.’s five children often gathered, facing a roaring fire, to listen to their father’s wonderful stories full of imagination. A formidable force in Andrew’s life, N.C.’s sudden death in 1945 shook him to the core and was to shape his artistic inclination to look back in time, ignite his obsession with death, and foster his association of objects with memory. As Richard Meryman has noted, after N.C. died, “painting after painting would become a posthumous portrait of his father.” (Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life, New York, 1996, p. 23)

For the artist, objects and people were interchangeable, with his painted objects almost always associated with particular people. Likewise, Wyeth sometimes identified with or even embodied the objects or figures he portrays. Peter Hurd, Andrew’s brother-in-law and mentor, as well as N.C.’s pupil and assistant, once explained that N.C. taught his students to: “‘equate [themselves] with the object, become the very object itself,’ a lesson he passed on to his son.” (quoted in Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth, New York, 1991, 59) As a result of this training, Andrew’s painted subjects reflect his own desires, tragedies, and triumphs, as well as his efforts to work through the grief of losing his father.

The abundance of physical objects in the artist’s paintings was noted in Wanda Corn’s dissertation on Wyeth, in which she catalogued, in particular, his use of windows, half-open doors, womb-like spaces, and vessels. (Wanda M. Corn, Andrew Wyeth: The Man, His Art, and His Audience, Ph.D. diss., New York, University, 1974, pp. 136-138) In general, the objects he paints fall into three categories: still lifes in nature, vessels, and thresholds, with the vessel compositions featuring bowls, boats, furniture, clothing, and architectural structures. In her insightful essay on the artist and his visual language of things, Anne Classen Knutson remarks that, “Vessels are often used in memorials as metaphors for memory storage…Wyeth’s painted objects are souvenirs that authenticate and revive his past experiences, making them endure into the present and creating what critic Susan Stewart calls a ‘continuous and personal narrative of the past.’” (“Andrew Wyeth’s Language of Things,” Andrew Wyeth: Memory & Magic, New York, 2015, p. 47)

Boats, or vessels, function recurrently in Wyeth’s work as posthumous portraits of their owners and as symbols of mourning, and it is possible that both model ships in the watercolor were owned by N.C. The title of the watercolor itself seems to describe the two competing artistic spirits of Andrew and his father. The central ship, with its small sails unfurled to catch an imaginary wind and a small wave of water under its bow that it “sails” on, With one active and the other stationary, the two vessels act as a visual contrapuntal to each other and may be a metaphor for Andrew following in the imposing artistic footsteps of his father. Placed in a location once full of familial pleasure, with nostalgia-invoking objects, the uninhabited setting seems to suspend time and place. In this way, Wyeth triggers in his viewers’ minds memories and fantasies, at once personal and universal, to create an otherworldly environment, full of longing and imagination.