Enhanced by the Land
by John O’Hern
Visiting the Reading Public Museum in Pennsylvania as a boy, Tim Barr was captivated by N.C. Wyeth’s painting Buttonwood Farm, 1920, which depicts a 100-foot tall sycamore, or buttonwood tree, in the Brandywine River valley. The tree stands next to Lafayette’s Revolutionary War headquarters and was an old tree then. “I knew N.C. and Andrew Wyeth’s renderings of the tree and always admired its shape,” Barr explains. “When I finally saw the tree in the Brandywine Battlefield State Park, I said, ‘I’ve got to do this tree…”
