In an exhibition on view through June 15, the Brandywine Museum of Art takes visitors through a survey of revered 20th-century artist Andrew Wyeth’s figurative works. Featuring rarely seen paintings and drawings, Andrew Wyeth: Human Nature explores one of the artist’s most enduring legacies—his highly original approach to the human body.
“Alongside his iconic landscapes, enigmatic interiors, abstract watercolors and sensitive botanical studies, his figure paintings speak to a lifelong effort to capture the human condition in its most intimate and unfiltered moments,” says William Coleman, curator at the Brandywine Museum. This marks the first exhibition to specifically survey Wyeth’s figure painting, including early figure drawings made in his father’s studio (the famed N.C. Wyeth), self-portraits, intimate depictions of close family members, a little known and fascinating body of commissioned portraits and much more.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Miss Olson, 1952. Tempera. Collection of the Brandywine Museum of Art, Gift of Alida R. Messinger, 2024. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
“Visitors will come away with new insight into the artist’s connections to the history of figure drawing in Western art as well as an understanding of the process that went into building some of his best loved works of this kind,” Coleman adds.
The exhibition draws from the collections of both the Brandywine Museum and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, offering visitors a compelling look into some of Wyeth’s most fascinating works. Among the highlights is an intimate 1952 portrait titled Miss Olson, recently gifted to the Brandywine.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Nogeeshik, 1972. Tempera. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Roasted Chestnuts, 1956. Tempera. Collection of the Brandywine Museum of Art, Gift of Mimi Haskell, 1971. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
“Miss Olson depicts Wyeth’s most famous model, Christina Olson, in a quiet moment. The tempera medium allows him to render each hair and crack in the wall behind her with care. It feels like nothing so much as a 17th-century Dutch portrait,” Coleman reflects.
“Another favorite is Fur Hat, Study for Adam,” he adds, “a never-before exhibited preparatory watercolor from the vast holdings of the Wyeth Foundation that shows the artist’s kaleidoscopic method: breaking down bodies into their constituent parts in order to render every facet faithfully in the finished work.”
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), Fur Hat, Study for Adam, 1963. Watercolor and pencil. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, B1093. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), My Mother, 1968. Drybrush watercolor. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, B3194. © 2025 Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS).
Other works to take a closer look at include Wyeth’s portrait of Professor Joyce Hill Stoner, a leading art conservator who shares in the exhibition’s wall texts a firsthand reflection on the experience of being painted by Wyeth. —
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