PROVENANCE
The Collection of Torben V. Kristiansen, Vancouver

EXHIBITED
The Art Emporium, Vancouver, Andrew Wyeth: Recent Works, October 4 – 18, 1977
Heather James Fine Art, Palm Desert, Art of the Wyeth Family, January 30 – June 15, 2017, traveling to Jackson Hole, Wyoming, July 1 – September 30, 2017

Andrew Wyeth was a master of winter. Snow delighted the American realist painter. He was excited to play in it and he loved the challenge of painting it. Snow, and all it represented in his recurring narrative around life and death, was among his enduring themes, and one unique to his paintings from his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.

The state of Maine, where Wyeth also lived, had plenty of snow to tempt him. But as a mostly seasonal resident, Wyeth only occasionally experienced winter in Maine. One of those times was the winter of 1968, when Wyeth returned to the community of Cushing for the funeral of Christina Olson, who appeared in his seminal egg tempera painting Christina’s World in 1948 and remained a subject for 20 years.

Wyeth responded to the heightened emotions inspired by fresh snow by throwing himself into solving the riddle of how to paint it. With watercolours, that involved quickly finding ways to contrast a predominantly white subject against a light surface. In the watercolour Under Snow from 1977, the focus of the image is a drift of snow packed among the trunk of a stout tree, the surface of the earth, and a large rock. Ferns emerge from beneath the snow in the foreground and there is a hint of lightness in the heavy sky, suggesting a tilt towards spring.

For Wyeth, it was a galvanizing experience to lighten dark bark by layering snow. He painted outdoors in the snow all his life. As he got older, he overcame the challenges of navigating the environment on foot by driving his SUV to his location and painting from inside the vehicle. The artist famously once said, “I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape—the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn’t show.” Perhaps no Wyeth painting illustrates that idea better than Under Snow. At its core, it embodies “the dead feeling of winter.”

The painting may be metaphoric about being stalwart, persevering, and surviving myriad challenges—the long winter, a tenacious family, unforgiving critics. But anyone accustomed to straddling the line between late winter and early spring knows well that what emerges from under snow today may soon be buried again tomorrow.

Wyeth made this painting in the steep woods behind his father’s studio on Rocky Hill in Chadds Ford. Thirty-seven years before he painted Under Snow, he made another winter watercolour in this general vicinity, My Father’s Studio. In that work, he featured his father’s apple trees.

Wyeth grew up here, as a boy played Robin Hood here, and for much of his life began his favourite daily walk among these trees and boulders. He knew these woods as well as he knew any in the world. It was here he took his wife, Betsy, during her first visit to Chadds Ford, when she was just 18. He later painted her portrait among these trees, and he painted his final portrait of frequent muse Helga here too.

A tree was never just a tree. It was a tree with a history, a legacy and a story. Many artists want to see the world. Wyeth did not. Whether in Pennsylvania or in Maine, he never wandered far from the woods of home or drifted too far from shore. Wyeth was interested in getting to know his small world better. He only painted what he knew best. Richard Meryman, Wyeth’s biographer, called this phenomenon his “geographic self-confinement.” Under Snow is an outstanding example of that intimacy of place, exquisitely and mysteriously rendered.

Privately owned in Canada since its creation, the painting has been exhibited twice—in 1977 at the Art Emporium in Vancouver and in a 2017 traveling exhibition at Heather James Fine Art in Palm Desert and Jackson Hole.

We thank Bob Keyes, writer and art historian with a specialization in American visual arts, for contributing the above essay. Keyes has spent more than 20 years writing about arts and culture for Colby College, the Portland Press Herald and Maine Sunday Telegram and has written extensively on the Wyeth family.

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

For the biography on Torben V. Kristiansen in PDF format, please click here.

All prices are in Canadian Dollars