Page 15 - The Hunt Winter 2021

Andrew didn’t become a cultural giant for continuing his dad’s vision. He pressed on
in his own way. “He was the last great easel artist—an enigmatic figure,” Maynard says. “Wyeth seemed to have great appeal to people who had the prints on the wall and his books on the coffee table—the people who lived far away from museums. His work found its way into small-town libraries and dorm rooms.
It exposed people to art who wouldn’t have been exposed to art. People from Mississippi, Tennessee—remote places like where I’m from. Wyeth was the guy who opened the world of art to these people.”
Maynard’s interest in the Brandywine Valley was piqued while writing a book
on Delaware architecture for the well-regarded “Buildings of the United States” series. “So little has been written about the Brandywine, and it’s so culturally important for Delaware,” he says. “I wrote [2014’s] The Brandywine: An Intimate Portrait, but I wasn’t quite satisfied,
I thought there was more to be said about Andrew.”
“[Wyeth explored] these hills and discovered in them what to us is a bleak, somber appearance. That’s the root of his art—that somberness, brooding, almost troubling quality you get on
a dark winter day.”
An expert on Brandywine Battlefield and Longwood Gardens, Maynard admits that personal curiosity figured heavily into the inspiration for Artists of Wyeth Country. Did the Chadds Ford countryside measure up to the landscapes he knew so well? Along with an unauthorized Wyeth biography taken from interviews with those who knew the artist, Maynard developed six tours that involve walking and driving. The images and illustrations include two maps commissioned for the book. “I blew up the maps for book signings,” he says.
Today’s Chadds Ford is “very different from N.C.’s and Andrew’s,” Maynard notes. As such, he wouldn’t recommend a bike
tour in an area rife with narrow, winding roads often frequented by trucks and SUVs. “Andrew didn’t want us to come to Chadds Ford, per se,” he surmises. “But when we understand his art from his perspective, we learn to search for our own Chadds Ford.”
Maynard offers a hypothetical scenario to illustrate his point. “[Andrew] walks and he walks—no preconceptions. After two hours or whatever, he goes around a bend and there’s the sun on a tree or a hornets’ nest, and it
hits like a thunderclap. That’s what he’s going to paint,” poses Maynard. “Anybody can go through nature and be ready for that kind of stimulus. It’s a good thing to do that.”
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