Wyeth Family

If any visitors to the Brandywine River Museum follow horse racing, they may connect the dots, noticing how a prominent local horse owner gives his thoroughbreds names such as Draft Age and Christina's World - and how there may be a filly in Saturday's 134th Kentucky Derby named Eight Belles. This horse-naming tale goes back to when Rick Porter, now an owner of top racehorses, spent part of his youth in the heart of Wyeth Country, living "across the hill" from a favorite subject of artist Andrew Wyeth.

Russell Henry takes great pride in his craft. The 80-year-old Birdsboro resident specializes in slipware pottery, a type in which the raw clay is painted before the pottery is fired. He said it was one of the crafts that Pennsylvania Dutch settlers brought with them. "My ancestors were Pennsylvania Dutch, and I take the same pride in my craft that they always took in theirs," Henry said. This pride will be on display at the ninth annual Fall Pennsylvania Crafts Day at the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford.

To be sure, the discovery of a secret cache of paintings by local artist Andrew Wyeth is a major find for the art world. But why must the world know about the model? What will be achieved by locating her and talking to her? Finding out who Helga is and what her relationship with Mr. Wyeth is will have no effect on the artistic or monetary value of the paintings. The press and public should stop their frantic assault into private lives. The paintings are obviously a very private and emotional effort, one that should not be tainted by examinations into the relationship between artist and subject.

A caretaker for the Wyeth family has been given permission to restore Gilpin's Public School No. 3 to its original state. On Thursday, Daniel Pepe, caretaker for the Wyeth's estate in Birmingham Township, received the township Zoning Hearing Board's approval to restore the one-room schoolhouse, built in 1904. Betsy Wyeth recently purchased the red brick and green serpentine stone building at 1175 Brinton's Bridge Rd. as part of her historic restoration efforts in the township.

The Unionville-Chadds Ford school board has voted to spend $5,000 to restore more than 40 paintings hanging in the Chadds Ford Elementary School, including 10 works by the Wyeth family. Elaine Lehman and Carol Swinburn, members of the elementary school's Parent-Teacher Organization, told the board last week that the school risked losing the art collection to neglect. The school has been collecting original art for nearly 40 years. Andrew Wyeth and his wife, Betsy, judged the school's first annual show of local artists' work in 1949, and the family supported the collection in the 1950s, when Jamie Wyeth attended the elementary school.

Brandywine River Museum, the place that has steadfastly exhibited more art by members of the Wyeth family more conspicuously than any other institution, is celebrating its 25th anniversary. The museum is staging a landscape painting exhibit, "The Land of the Brandywine. " The show has just three things to say: It defines the relationship to three generations of the Wyeth family, above all. Indeed, 68 of these 115 featured paintings are by four Wyeths. Second, it leaves no one guessing that this museum has been collecting art seriously and aims to continue doing so. And third, it convinces us that the Brandywine Valley merits full-length treatment as a theme show.

Each year, thousands of visitors are drawn to the Brandywine River Museum to see the artistic legacy of N.C. Wyeth, the illustrator who helped to make the Brandywine school of painting famous. Beginning Friday, visitors will also be able to understand first-hand where and how those Wyeth paintings were created. For the first time, the large frame studio where Wyeth worked for more than 30 years will be open to the public. The studio - along with 18 acres of land, the Wyeth home, and a 1912 bar - was left to the museum by the artist's daughter Caroline, who died in 1994.

Painter Andrew Wyeth once remarked that people today are interested only in colorful, flashy paintings that he called the "visual cocktail. " Wyeth was defending his own melancholy work, but he might have been describing the division between much of contemporary art and the art of the Brandywine Valley. Some little-known facts: There was no actual school of Brandywine painters, although there was Howard Pyle's famous school of illustrators here. There were also artists and illustrators who were drawn to the area's natural beauty.

If you visit the Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford during the holiday season, you will see artisans and craftworkers in the courtyard selling hand- woven clothes, ceramics and cleverly designed Christmas ornaments made from thistles, twigs and berries. Many of these people are part of an artists' community that has sprung up around Chadds Ford because of the museum, which is housed in a restored 19th- century gristmill, and its patrons, the Wyeth family - particularly Andrew and Jamie Wyeth.

Against the backdrop of narrow, one-way streets and glass-fronted stores that look blankly onto rows of parking meters, artist Rea Redifer, 63, is a familiar but unobtrusive figure. He's not one to talk openly about his numerous professional activities - as a painter, filmmaker, screenwriter, newspaper columnist, Civil War historian, and aviation expert. Nor does he fit the image of the classic reclusive artist. He has a quick, wiry manner of moving, and he is on a first-name basis with local shopkeepers and the waitresses at the Kennett Square Inn. When he appears in town, usually dressed in khakis, sneakers and a faded denim jacket, he could easily be mistaken for a man on a mission to the local hardware store.

The oil painting by N.C. Wyeth depicting the artist with his wife and five children is an affectionate rendering of the famously creative brood from Chadds Ford. If you could rotate the canvas 180 degrees, however, and peer through the top layer of paint with a kind of X-ray vision, you would behold a snarling villain, his face lit by the red glare of an iron furnace. In fact, three scientists have done just that, unveiling their find yesterday at an American Chemical Society conference in Washington.

If any visitors to the Brandywine River Museum follow horse racing, they may connect the dots, noticing how a prominent local horse owner gives his thoroughbreds names such as Draft Age and Christina's World - and how there may be a filly in Saturday's 134th Kentucky Derby named Eight Belles. This horse-naming tale goes back to when Rick Porter, now an owner of top racehorses, spent part of his youth in the heart of Wyeth Country, living "across the hill" from a favorite subject of artist Andrew Wyeth.

In 1989, Andrew Wyeth finished painting a wry inside joke - a tribute, of sorts, to all the models he had loved before. Snow Hill includes Helga Testorf, the artist's most famous subject, but not looking downcast and distant, as he'd painted her in the past. In this one, Testorf kicks up her heels as she frolics round a maypole in the snow. Her dance partners are fellow Chadds Ford residents who appear repeatedly in Wyeth's work, often with a signature trait. Among them, there's Karl Kuerner, his World War II overcoat flying behind him, and Bill Loper, with a hook for a hand.

A day before the public opening of the Andrew Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, Betsy and Andrew Wyeth took a private tour of the exhibition, and, pleased by what they had seen, went home to Chadds Ford and composed a letter offering the museum a souvenir from the show. Actually, nine of them: five watercolors and four graphite drawings that served as studies for Groundhog Day, one of the museum's precious few Wyeths. "They said they thought it was the most beautiful show of his work they'd ever seen," said Kathleen A. Foster, the museum's curator of American art and one of the curators of the Wyeth show.

Painter Andrew Wyeth once remarked that people today are interested only in colorful, flashy paintings that he called the "visual cocktail. " Wyeth was defending his own melancholy work, but he might have been describing the division between much of contemporary art and the art of the Brandywine Valley. Some little-known facts: There was no actual school of Brandywine painters, although there was Howard Pyle's famous school of illustrators here. There were also artists and illustrators who were drawn to the area's natural beauty.

Up in Maine, where Andrew Wyeth has spent summers since he was a boy, his 80th birthday on July 12 wasn't allowed to pass quietly. Both the Portland Art Museum and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, a few miles up the coast from his summer home in Cushing, opened "Happy birthday, Andy" exhibitions. Although both shows focus on Wyeth's Maine subjects, they also cover the broader span of his remarkable career as America's most beloved painter. Despite being the smaller, the Farnsworth show delivers more of Wyeth at his best.

Although it may by now be a cliche, the image of the misunderstood, isolated artist has long been part of the mystique of the Wyeth family. The founder of America's best-known art dynasty, N.C. Wyeth was the illustrator of such classics as Treasure Island, Robin Hood and Robinson Crusoe, which captured the imaginations of generations of readers. But as an artist, he was temperamental and dissatisfied by the thought that he would be remembered for his commercial work, not for the landscapes and still lifes he did in his spare time.

Chadds Ford has responded to its distance from New York "high art" by making a civic virtue out of the art of three generations of its Wyeth family. The Wyeth clan is returning the favor now by lending a number of artworks and memorabilia to a summerlong exhibition celebrating the family's attachment since the turn of the century to Chadds Ford village. The focus is "the early years" in the display at the Brandywine River Museum on home turf. Looking back on it, the launching of this Wyeth and Brandywine tradition-centered museum in Chadds Ford more than 25 years ago was a remarkable affirmation of faith in Chadds Ford-bred popular forms of American painting and illustration as a public trust, and in museums as the educational link between art and the public.

Each year, thousands of visitors are drawn to the Brandywine River Museum to see the artistic legacy of N.C. Wyeth, the illustrator who helped to make the Brandywine school of painting famous. Beginning Friday, visitors will also be able to understand first-hand where and how those Wyeth paintings were created. For the first time, the large frame studio where Wyeth worked for more than 30 years will be open to the public. The studio - along with 18 acres of land, the Wyeth home, and a 1912 bar - was left to the museum by the artist's daughter Caroline, who died in 1994.

Against the backdrop of narrow, one-way streets and glass-fronted stores that look blankly onto rows of parking meters, artist Rea Redifer, 63, is a familiar but unobtrusive figure. He's not one to talk openly about his numerous professional activities - as a painter, filmmaker, screenwriter, newspaper columnist, Civil War historian, and aviation expert. Nor does he fit the image of the classic reclusive artist. He has a quick, wiry manner of moving, and he is on a first-name basis with local shopkeepers and the waitresses at the Kennett Square Inn. When he appears in town, usually dressed in khakis, sneakers and a faded denim jacket, he could easily be mistaken for a man on a mission to the local hardware store.