Philadelphia Weekly

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It was a day right out of an Andrew Wyeth painting. The snow had crusted over and the trees were stripped to their essence. Wyeth preferred winter, once saying, "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."

This past Saturday, 3,900 people filed through the Brandywine River Museum to pay their final respects to Chester County's most prominent artist who died last month. There was black bunting draping the brick walls of the renovated gristmill, and visitors laid flowers and candles on the cobblestone walkways surrounding the building.

Cheryl Stirling from Downingtown grew up with Andrew Wyeth's work, buying her first print when she was in high school. She said she got the chills when she saw Goodbye, Wyeth's last painting, which is on display for the first time. Goodbye shows the wake of a passing sailboat cutting through the watery reflection of a gleaming white farmhouse in Maine. Nearby, Christina's World, one of Wyeth's most well-known paintings, hung for the first time in the Brandywine (on loan from the Museum Of Modern Art in New York). The exhibition of these two works plus a day of free admission, overflowed the parking lot and turned Route 1 into a traffic jam.

Sandy Stefanowisz parked across the four-lane road a few blocks away and hobbled along the concrete median strip because she felt it was important to be there. "It's like going to Washington for the inaugural," she said. "There are certain moments you feel you are honoring that person, you are part of that moment."

While most came to honor an artist who himself had honored the Chadd's Ford landscape in tempera, for some this was their first exposure. Jared Stauffer had heard of Wyeth but never took the time to look until after his death. He liked the simplicity of his work. "You don't have to look at the black screen and think it's something other than black when it's not," he said. "You look at a barn and it's a barn, and a river is a river. They are paintings everyone can relate to."

As the recent Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art showed, quiet complexities and incredible observations are buried in his canvases. When asked which of Wyeth's prints are hanging in their homes, most Brandywine visitors said Snow Hill, a large painting of faceless figures dancing around a maypole. One of the pole's streamers doesn't have a dancer and many believe that absence is Wyeth himself. It's reminiscent of Dorothy's entourage in The Wizard of Oz, but instead of a long yellow brick road they move in a circle. "Look at his comments. He thinks everything is endless, everything is forever," said Joe Kelly, who came with his wife Rosemary. "Even though he's passing, it's still a joyous time. Life goes on and things continue. There's really very little change. He captures that in Snow Hill."

Wyeth was part of a formidable continuum of painters, as the son of the great illustrator N.C. Wyeth, sister of Caroline Wyeth, father of Jamie Wyeth and mentor to many artists both famous and unknown. His legacy cannot be tracked.

Jenny Menkewicz said Andrew Wyeth's influence is coming at a perfect time in her life. The frustrated business analyst and online help developer is a recent victim of our economic crisis. "I've lost my job and now I'm looking for the right path. While it's not of this scale, I'm more interested in pursuing the non-conventional," she explains. "I'm grateful I came."