Friendship Sloop

Andrew Wyeth remembered that his father called his paintings in this style "prism paintings." It was the artist’s attempt to depict refracted light and its effect on form. N. C. Wyeth may have seen more radical examples of compositions shattered into triangular and polygonal planes of color in the collection of his friend, the art critic Christian Brinton, but he generally explored the convention in backgrounds, leaving the main subject readily discernable. When it was exhibited in Wilmington in 1934, the local press described the painting as "a blare of color running in ordered riot, as it were, with the outline of a sailing vessel discernible amid the sunshine after a few moments of study."