Still Life with Chipped Blue Bowl and Bittersweet

The color scheme of this work recalls Wyeth's instructions to friend and artist Sidney Chase regarding still-life practice: "Paint a colorful still life once a week, spend no more than two days on them; don't worry about too careful drawing but get some emphatic color scheme interpretive of the groups...Make [an] arrangement in blue and gold and play with the color until it plays a gorgeous symphony of these two colors" (NCW to Sidney M. Chase, dated in another hand Oct. 16, 1922, Wyeth Family Archives). The ceramic bottle (NCWS.95.1535) remains in Wyeth's studio collection.

Handwritten notations ("10/6," "1212," "Buffalo Bill," and " 9") on the stretcher bars suggest that the stretcher bars, if not the actual canvas, were originally used for one of Wyeth's illustrations for a 1916 article by William F. Cody, published in Hearst's Magazine 1916. Those notations provide an earliest possible date for this painting.