North Light

This evocative view of his father’s studio in Chadds Ford carries the weight of much personal history for the artist. Andrew Wyeth played in and around this studio as a boy and then, in 1932, had his first formal art lessons there under his father’s tutelage. Wyeth drew from geometric forms and still-life objects that remain in the studio today and then "graduated" to working in oils. After N. C. Wyeth’s death, the building became almost a family museum to N. C. Wyeth’s memory; most of N. C. Wyeth’s props, reference library and archival material remained untouched. Along with the house in which Andrew Wyeth grew up and an eighteen-acre hillside property, the studio was acquired by the Brandywine Conservancy in 1982; in 1997 it was designated a National Historic Landmark.

North Light is a study in whites, accented by the dark form of the window and the tracings of the barren branches. It was not unusual for Andrew Wyeth to paint a portrait of a person without actually depicting the sitter; in this case, North Light has to be considered a portrait of N. C. Wyeth.