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Henriette Wyeth Exhibition at the James A. Michener Art MusEUm
February 7, 2018
Magical & Real: Henriette Wyeth and Peter Hurd, A Retrospective open at the James A. Michener Art Museum Doylestown, PA
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Henriette Wyeth was the eldest daughter of N.C. Wyeth and Carolyn Bockius Wyeth. At the age of eleven she began studying art under the guidance of her father. Henriette inherited her father’s determination – even a crippled right hand from a childhood struggle with polio could not prevent her from painting. Her teen years were spent at the Normal Art School in Boston and later the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts in Philadelphia.
After her schooling, she returned to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and continued her art studies under her father’s guidance. It was here where she would meet Peter Hurd, who also studied with N.C. Wyeth. Their romance became known to all and the couple married in 1929. They initially established their home and studio in Chadds Ford; in 1940, the couple permanently settled in Hurd’s home state of New Mexico at the Sentinel Ranch in San Patricio. She became the only Wyeth to leave the East Coast.
The West proved to be a spring of inspiration that allowed Henriette to flourish as a painter. Her still life paintings of New Mexican objects are rendered in brilliant colors, and her portraits often feature the expansive desert mountains as backdrops. She used subtle melding of color and texture to create paintings with lyrical beauty that combine aspects of realism and abstraction. Her sense of emotion elevates these elements in importance. Her objects show signs of reality but always retain the mystery she believed each item possessed. As a young artist she had followed N.C. Wyeth’s advice to “paint the light and air around the subject—paint the mystery” through a series of fantasy paintings that drew on her interest in the theater and ballet.
Henriette also painted portraits of well-known subjects such as actress Helen Hayes, prize-winning author Paul Horgan and First Lady Pat Nixon. Capturing more than a likeness of her subjects, she positioned the figure to be a design of her own creation. She loved painting children as an embodiment of innocence and youth. Henriette Wyeth’s portraits and still life paintings attest to the fact that she is considered by many art scholars to be one of the greatest women painters of the twentieth century.
“Nothing is easy. It is not easy to have a baby, for a tree to grow–but that’s what is beautiful. That is part of the beauty. To wish for a life of ease is ridiculous. When I think about how I really do feel it overcomes me. Then I wonder if I’ve done enough.” – Henriette Wyeth.
Selected Exhibitions with Somerville Manning Gallery
2011 Equus
2008 Wyeth Women