Jamie Wyeth has since adolescence attracted considerable attention as a third-generation American artist: son of Andrew Wyeth, among the country’s most popular painters, and the grandson of Newell Convers Wyeth, famous for his distinctive illustrations for the classic novels by Stevenson, Cooper, and Scott. “Everybody in my family paints – excluding possibly the dogs,” says Jamie Wyeth. And non-human subjects are a common theme: long a sensitive observer of his rural surroundings, he paints livestock and other animals with the same care and intensity he devotes to portraits of people. He won precocious fame, in fact, with Portrait of Pig, his picture of a pink and white sow. The technical facility Wyeth showed even in his early work helps explain why his first one-man show in New York happened when he was only 20, and a retrospective in Omaha, Nebraska, occurred before his 30th birthday.
James Browning Wyeth was born on July 6, 1946, in Wilmington, Delaware, just south of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and still lives part of each year. His mother is Betsy (James) Wyeth; he has an older brother, Nicholas. During childhood, Wyeth had before him the example not only of his father and grandfather but also two of his aunts, Carolyn Wyeth and Henriette (Wyeth) Hurd, and his uncles Peter Hurd and John McCoy – all painters. With pencils, brushes, and paints always at hand, the boy found it natural to use them to express his impression of a book he’d read or a movie he’d seen. He left public school after the sixth grade to be tutored at home so he could devote more time to art. Having acquired most of his own schooling from private tutors, his father didn’t consider a formal education necessary for an artist. After taking English and history lessons in the morning, Jamie Wyeth would go to his aunt Carolyn’s studio, where for the first year he was assigned to drawing spheres and cubes. Although bored by such disciplinary exercises, he understood their value.
Indifferent to sports and games and undistracted by the social activities that would have claimed his attention in school, Jamie Wyeth spent at least eight hours a day studying, sketching, and painting. His natural talent developed under the guidance of his father, who in his own youth had the benefit of N. C. Wyeth’s instruction and encouragement. His father, he recalls, didn’t actually give him lessons, but rather let him work and then offered constructive criticism.
By the time he was 18, Wyeth’s paintings hung in the permanent collections of the Wilmington Society of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, and in the William A. Farnsworth Library and Art Museum in Rockland, Maine – as well as in several private collections. He’d begun to paint portraits in oils, including works that still stand among his most powerful, such as Draft Age and Shorty. Wyeth examined all aspects of the appearance and character of the people he painted. For his portrait of Lincoln Kirstein, he required 200 hours of sittings by the impresario. True to his thoroughgoing approach, Wyeth studied anatomy one winter in New York by working every Saturday at a Harlem hospital morgue.
But if he had the advantage of a celebrated family name, Jamie Wyeth also faced the immediate rejection of his work by some of the avant-garde critics who dictated the criteria for the New York art scene. Some lost no time in transferring their distaste for the traditional style and themes of Andrew Wyeth’s realistic canvases to the paintings of his son.
While serving in the Delaware Air National Guard from 1966 to 1971, Wyeth was commissioned to paint a portrait of Charles L. Terry, Delaware’s governor, although he rarely accepts commissions for portraits. He was also persuaded by people close to the Kennedys to undertake a posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy. He familiarized himself with Kennedy’s appearance through photographs, motion picture footage, and talks with people who knew him, including several discussions at Hyannisport, Massachusetts, with the President’s widow. To get a sense of the living President, he made numerous sketches of his brothers, Robert and Edward Kennedy.
In another departure, toward the end of the 1960s, Wyeth took part in Eyewitness to Space, jointly sponsored by the NASA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington – a program designed to record details of the United States space probes. As a participating artist, he covered both launchings and splashdowns. Another historic event that provided subjects for his drawings was Watergate: on trips to Washington from Maine in the spring, summer, and fall of 1974, he sketched incidents in the Senate and Supreme Court relating to Watergate developments, as well as the tense courtroom scenes in Judge John J. Sirica’s trial of John D. Erlichman and other defendants.
Meanwhile, Jamie Wyeth’s work had become more widely known, having been shown alongside his father’s and grandfather’s at an exhibition in 1971 at the newly opened Brandywine River Museum at Chadds Ford, a handsome building had been converted from an old grist mill by the nonprofit Brandywine Conservancy formed to save the area from overdevelopment. A highlight of the show was the younger Wyeth’s meticulously executed Portrait of Pig, which spans seven by five feet. Wyeth has since created many other “portraits” of animals, ranging from Newfoundland (1971) to The Raven (1980).
In 1973, the Brandywine River Museum showed 143 portraits by members of the Wyeth family, including painters who had married into it. Jamie Wyeth displayed a recently completed self-portrait, Pumpkinhead – Self Portrait, showing a scarecrow-like body topped with a grinning pumpkin. The Joslyn Art Museum in Omaha held the first full retrospective of his work in the winter of 1975-1976, when more than forty of his drawings, watercolors, and oils were exhibited. He drew further national attention with a show at the Coe-Kerr Gallery in 1976 of the portraits he and the late pop artist Andy Warhol did of one another.
Attracted by Wyeth’s realistic style, officials of the Soviet Union invited him in the summer of 1975 to tour a variety of the country’s art centers. While there, he sought out dissident artists and argued their cause with his official hosts, but he could not budge them. In March 1987, Wyeth again visited the Soviet Union, this time in Leningrad to attend the opening of An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, a major exhibition of 117 works by him, his father and grandfather. At a press conference in Leningrad, Wyeth said, “Painting, music, dance, and literature are not themselves the tools of politics – and should not be – but they do set yardsticks of aspiration, standards of excellence, and emblems of humanity. It is my fervent hope that the work of my family, that this exhibition in some small way will contribute to a world of better understanding and peace.”
Like his father, Jamie Wyeth is able to evoke the character of a person without actually including them in a painting. Wolfbane (1984) is a portrait of his wife Phyllis Mills Wyeth, who has been the subject of many of his works. Here, however, she is not visible, but is represented by her hat, which hangs over the back of a chair. The delicately painted hat, with its highlighted white sash, suggest a feeling of gracefulness.
Some of Wyeth’s one-man exhibitions have included those at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts (1980), Greenville Museum of Art, SC (1981), Amon Carter Museum (1981), Anchorage Fine Arts Museum (1983), State Museum, Alaska (1983), Portland Museum of Art (1984), Columbia Museum of Art (1984), Oklahoma Arts Center (1985), Farnsworth Art Museum (1993), Brandywine River Museum (1994) and Decatur House, Washington, DC (1995).
Since 1969 Wyeth has served as a member of the advisory committee of the United States Postal Service. He designed one of the 1971 eight-cent Christmas stamps depicting the partridge in a pear tree of the English carol “The Twelve Days of Christmas.” Wyeth was commissioned by President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan to produce the official White House Christmas cards for 1981 and 1984. In 1994 the U.S. Mint commissioned Wyeth to produce a portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver for use on the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games Commemorative Coin commemorating her works with the Special Olympics. He volunteered his time and talent for the coin effort. The 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games Commemorative Coin was the U.S. Mint’s largest selling coin in 1995. He also lent his support to lighthouse preservation efforts in Maine with his 1995 exhibition, Jamie Wyeth: “Island Light” and the unveiling of a limited, signed and numbered edition of Iris at Sea.
Jamie Wyeth has illustrated two children’s books. The first, in 1979, The Stray, written by his mother, Betsy James Wyeth, and published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux. Cabbages and Kings, written by Elizabeth Seabrook, published June, 1997 by Viking Children’s Books, Penguin Putnam Inc. In June, 1997, The Terra Museum of American Art’s exhibition, N.C. Wyeth and His Grandson: A Legacy, exhibited his illustrations along with his grandfather’s.
In 1972, Wyeth was appointed a council member of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975, he became a member of the board of governors of the National Space Institute. He is a member of the national Academy of Design and the American Watercolor Society.
Jamie Wyeth holds honorary degrees from Elizabethtown College, 1975, Elizabethtown, PA, Dickinson School of Law, 1983, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, Pine Manor College, 1987, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, University of Vermont, 1988, Burlington, Vermont and Westbrook College, Portland, Maine, 1993.
Wyeth’s works are included in many public collections, including those of the Terra Museum of American Art, National Gallery of Art, National Portrait Gallery, John F. Kennedy Library, Museum of Modern Art, Joslyn Art Museum, Farnsworth Art Museum, Delaware Art Museum, and Brandywine River Museum. Wyeth is a participating lender for the United States Department of State, Art in Embassies Program.
When Wyeth had his first exhibition in New York in 1965, he received a scathing review by the New York Times. His work was compared to that of his ancestors, neither of whom were considered contenders in the commercial business of modern art. Jamie Wyeth’s critics level some of the same charges as they do against his father—to some, both artists seem anachronistic, too close to illustration, and out of touch with the 20th century evolution of Post-Picasso modernism. He answers, “We’re charged, my father and I, with being a pack of illustrators. I’ve always taken it as a supreme compliment. What’s wrong with illustration? There’s this thing now that illustrations are sort of secondary to art and I think it’s a bunch of crap.”
According to the Brandywine River Museum, “James Wyeth had earned national attention with a posthumous portrait of John F. Kennedy and other work. Later, he produced striking portraits of Rudolf Nureyev and Andy Warhol, studies for which are in the museum’s collection. Since then, Wyeth has established a distinctive style, characterized by strong images and sharp contrasts in his landscapes and portraits. He is known for his monumental animal portraits, including Portrait of Pig and Raven in the museum’s collection, which represents various stages in his changing style.”
In “Jamie Wyeth: Proteus in Paint” Joyce Hill Stoner said of Wyeth: Jamie Wyeth lives on his own terms with a healthy respect for his heritage and a unique ability to translate acute observations into a spectrum of visual experiences in an impressive range of styles from the laser-like intensity of Portrait of Shorty to the archetypal but ironic encrusted image of an animal friend in Portrait of Pig to the eerie painterly dreamscape of Comet.
Ann Morgan, author of Oxford Dictionary of American Art and Arts, describes his style as one that follows the realistic style of his father, Andrew Wyeth, while venturing into “more psychologically fraught territory”. When making portraits, Wyeth sees into the nature of an individual and portrays them with such detail and realism that the shocked subjects “often hid them up in their closets”.
2015 Crystal Bridges Museum of American Art, Bentonville, AR 7/23/25 – 10/5/15 Jamie Wyeth
2015 San Antonio Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX 4/25/15 – 7/5/15 Jamie Wyeth
2015 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 1/17/15 – 4/5/15 Jamie Wyeth
2014 – 2015 Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, MA 7/16/14 – 1/5/15 Jamie Wyeth
2013 Shelburne Museum, Shelburne, VT 6/22/13 – 10/27/13 Wyeth Vertigo
2013 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 6/15/13 – 11/17/13 Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan
2013 Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC 2/6/13 – 4/21/13 Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan
2012 Farnsworth Art Musuem, Rockland, ME 5/10/12 – 12/30/12 Jamie Wyeth, Rockwell Kent and Monhegan
2011 – 2012 The Mona Bismarck Museum, Paris, France 11/7/11 – 2/11/12 The Wyeths: Three Generations of Art
2011 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 6/11/11 – 9/11/11 Farm Work by Jamie Wyeth
2011 Kalamazoo Institute of Arts, Kalamazoo, MI 1/15/11 – 4/17/11 The Wyeths: America’s Artists
2010 – 2011 Philbrook Museum of Art, Tulsa, OK 12/19/2010 – 3/20/2011 The Wyeth Legacy: Cowan Collection Paintings
2010 – 2011 Farnsworth Art Musuem, Rockland, ME 5/15/10 – 1/2/11 Wyeth’s Wyeths
2010 Meredith Long and Company, Houston, TX 10/22/10 – 11/20/10 Jamie Wyeth Paintings
2010 Dulwich Picture Gallery, London 6/9/10 – 8/22/10 The Wyeth Family: Three Generations of American Art
2010 Nassau Art Musuem, Long Island, NY 5/29/10 – 9/12/10 The Sea Around Us
2010 Salt Lake City Art Center, Salt Lake City, UT 1/27/10 – 5/22/10 Jamie Wyeth: The Seven Deadly Sins
2009 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME 5/16/09 – 8/31/09 Jamie Wyeth: Seven Deadly Sins
2009 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 9/12/09 – 11/30/09 Jamie Wyeth: Seven Deadly Sins
2009 Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO 9/17/09 – 11/28/09 Wyeth: Three Generations of Artistry
2008 Adelson Galleries, New York, NY 3/14/08 – 4/18/08 Jamie Wyeth: Seven Deadly Sins and Recent Works
2007 – 2008 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME 9/8/07 – 5/18/08 James Wyeth: Selected Works
2007 Ogunquit Museum of American Art, Ogunquit, ME 7/1 – 8/21/07 Jamie Wyeth: Paintings
2007 Leigh Yawkey Woodson Museum, Wausau, WI 6/15 – 8/26/07 Jamie Wyeth: Birds
2007 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 6/8 – 9/3/07 Dog Days of Summer: Works by Jamie Wyeth
2007 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, ME 4/30 – 8/30/07 Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat
2007 McNay Museum of Art, San Antonio, TX 1/16 – 4/8/07 Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat
2006 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 9/8 – 11/19/06 Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat
2006 Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, MO 6/2 – 9/3/06 Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer
2006 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 5/15 – 10/15/06 James Wyeth: Portrait of an Artist
2006 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 4/1 – Summer ’06 Jamie Wyeth’s Birds
2006 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 2/4 – May ’06 James Wyeth: Selected Works
2006 Naples Museum of Art, Naples, FL 1/21 – 5/14/06 The Wyeths
2005 Adelson Galleries, New York, NY 10/25 – 11/26/05 Gulls, Ravens, and a Vulture: The Ornithological Paintings of James Wyeth
2005 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 6/26 – 10/10/05 Gulls, Ravens, and a Vulture: The Ornithological Paintings of James Wyeth
2003 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 1/19 – 6/1/03 James Wyeth: Portraits and Landscapes
2003 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 1/18 – 5/18/03 Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer
2002 – 2003 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 6/9/02 – 1/5/03 Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer
2002 New York Public Library for the Performing Arts at the Lincoln Center 3/22 – 5/25/02 Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer
2002 The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts 2/7 – 3/10/02 Capturing Nureyev: James Wyeth Paints the Dancer
2001 – 2002 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 5/14/01 – 05/26/02 The Maine Influence: Selected Works by James Wyeth
2001 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 1/14 – 5/13/01 The Maine Influence: Selected Works by James Wyeth
2001 – 2002 Ringling Museum of Art, Sarasota, FL 10/11/01 – 1/6/02 One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2001 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 6/2 – 9/3/01 One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2001 New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT 2/15 – 4/30/01 One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2001 Russell Rotunda, Capitol Building, Washington, DC 1/14 – 1/21/01 One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2000 – 2001 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 8/12/00 – 1/1/01 One Nation: Patriots and Pirates
2000 James Graham and Sons, 1014 Madison Ave, NY, NY 11/2 – 12/2/00 America on Paper: Perspectives on People and Places by American Masters
2000 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 5/13 – 8/6/00 Monhegan
1999 – 2000 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 10/99 – 5/7/00 Paintings, Props, and Costumes:
Objects of Inspiration
1999 – 2002 NASA/American Museum in Motion 7/99 – 2002 Art Train (42-Month Train Tour to 120 Communities)
1999 – 2000 Butler Museum of American Art, Youngstown, OH 3/16/99 – 4/18/00 Cabbages and Kings
1999 – 2000 James Graham and Sons, New York, NY 12/2/99 – 1/15/00 Dead Cat Museum, Monhegan
Island and Other Recent Works
1999 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 5/29/99 – 10/17/99 A Century of Wyeths
1998 Delaware Art Museum, Wilmington, DE 12/10/98 – 2/21/99 Wondrous Strange
1998 Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 6/21/98 – 11/8/98 Wondrous Strange
1998 The Speed Art Museum, Louisville, KY 6/2/98 – 8/16/98 Wyeth Three Generations
1998 Marietta / Cobb Museum of Art, Marietta, GA 2/3/98 – 5/3/98 The Wyeths: N.C., Andrew and Jamie
1998 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 1/24/98 – 3/29/98 N.C. Wyeth and His Grandson: A Legacy
1997 Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL 6/28/97 – 10/26/97 N.C. Wyeth and His Grandson: A Legacy
1996 Double Door Gallery, Islesboro, ME 8/3/96 – 8/10/96 (James Graham & Sons) Images of Maine
1995 James Graham & Sons, New York, NY 11/16/95 – 12/21/95 Island Light
1995 The Carriage House of Decatur House, Washington, DC 10/31/95 – 11/14/95 Island Light
1993 James Graham & Sons, New York, NY 9/11/93 – 10/9/93 Jamie Wyeth: Islands
1993 Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 6/??/93 – 8/22/93 Jamie Wyeth: Islands
1990 Coe Kerr Gallery, Inc., New York, NY 11/10/90 – 12/1/90 Jamie Wyeth Oils, Mixed Medias and Watercolors
1988 Coe Kerr Gallery, Inc., New York, NY 11/18/88 – 12/22/88 Jamie Wyeth Recent Works
1988 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 9/17/88 – 11/22/88 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1988 Fitzwilliam Museum, Cambridge, England 7/12/88 – 8/29/88 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1988 Palazzo Reale, Milan, Italy 5/17/88 – 6/20/88 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1988 Sciagaya Art Museum, Tokyo, Japan 3/10/88 – 4/21/88 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1987 Terra Museum of American Art, Chicago, IL 12/13/87 – 2/14/88 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1987 Dallas Museum of Art, Dallas, TX 9/29/87 – 11/29/87 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1987 Coreoran Gallery of Art, Washington, DC 7/4/87 – 8/30/87 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1987 Academy of the Arts of the USSR, Moscow 4/24/87 – 5/31/87 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1987 Academy of the Arts of the USSR, Leningrad 3/11/87 – 5/31/87 An American Vision Three Generations of Wyeth Art
1986 Hall Galleries Inc., Dallas, TX 4/7/86 – 5/12/86 Jamie Wyeth: New Works
1985 Amot Art Museum, Elmira, NY 12/7/85 – 2/23/86 Three Generations of Wyeth
1985 Montgomery Gallery, San Francisco, CA 4/10/85 – 5/18/85 Jamie Wyeth Special Works
1984 Oklahoma Art Center, Oklahoma City, OK 11/30/84 – 1/20/85 Jamie Wyeth: An American View
1984 Columbia Museum, Columbia, SC 9/16/84 – 11/11/84 Jamie Wyeth: An American View
1984 Portland Museum of Art, Portland, ME 6/19/84 – 9/9/84 Jamie Wyeth: An American View
1984 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY 5/2/84 – 5/24/84 Jamie Wyeth Recent Works
1984 North Carolina Museum of Art, Raleigh, NC 2/4/84 – 4/1/84 Howard Pyle and the Wyeths: Four Generations of American Imagination
1984 Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, CA 11/12/83 – 1/2/84 Howard Pyle and the Wyeths: Four Generations of American Imagination
1983 Memphis Brooks Museum of Art, Memphis, TN 9/1/83 – 10/23/83 Howard Pyle and the Wyeths: Four Generations of American Imagination
1983 Artique Ltd. Fine Art Gallery, Anchorage, AK 3/11/83 – 4/11/83 Jamie Wyeth in Alaska Exhibition of Original Paintings and Etchings
1983 Alaska State Museum, Juneau, AK 4/22/83 – 5/1/83 Jamie Wyeth in Alaska
1983 University of Alaska Museum, Fairbanks, AK 4/1/83 – 4/17/83 Jamie Wyeth in Alaska
1983 Anchorage Fine Arts Museum, Anchorage, AK 3/13/83 – 3/27/83 Jamie Wyeth in Alaska
1981 Amon Carter Museum of Western Art, Fort Worth, TX 4/23/81 – 6/7/81 Jamie Wyeth
1981 Greenville County Museum of Art, Greenville, SC 1/17/81 – 3/29/81 Jamie Wyeth
1980 Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, Philadelphia, PA 9/19/80 – 12/14/80 Jamie Wyeth
1978 Columbus Gallery of Fine Arts January, 1978 Jamie Wyeth Recent Paintings
1977 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY 11/10/77 – 12/3/77 James Wyeth Recent Paintings
1976 Coe Kerr Gallery, New York, NY 6/3/76 – 7/9/76 Andy Warhol & Jamie Wyeth Portraits of Each Other
1976 Joslyn Art Museum, Omaha, NE 11/16/75 – 1/18/76 James Wyeth
1975 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA 11/29/74 – 1/5/75 James Wyeth Recent Paintings
1974 Coe Ken Gallery, New York, NY 11/7/74 – 11/25/74 James Wyeth Recent Paintings
1971 Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford 6/18/71 – 10/31/71 The Brandywine Heritage
1969 Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, ME 7/11/69 – 9/8/69 Oils, Watercolors, Drawings by James Wyeth
1966 M. Knoedler & Co., New York, NY 11/29/66 – 12/23/66 James Wyeth Painting
