Portrait of the artist Andrew Wyeth done by his sister, Henriette Hurd.
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The idyl ended on an October morning in 1945: N.C. was killed by a train that struck his station wagon in Chadds Ford. Wyeth took his father's death harder than any of the others in the family. Intimations of mortality clouded the clear sky of fantasy. He had never painted his father. Three years after N.C.'s death, Wyeth painted Karl, a stern portrait of his neighbor Karl Kuerner, shown in his attic room. Above Karl's head are two meat hooks, like falcon's claws, thrust down from the ceiling. Says Wyeth: "It was really a portrait of my father, of course."
Five years after his father's death, when Wyeth was 33, some bloodstains on his pillow led him to the discovery that he was suffering from bronchiectasis, a disease of the bronchial tubes of one lung. They were removed in an operation so drastic that his chest had to be opened from top to bottom, slashing his shoulder muscles so that he thought he might never be able to paint again. While convalescing, he painted The Trodden Weed, with his arm suspended in a sling from the ceiling. The boots that flatten the weed once belonged to Howard Pyle and were Betsy's Christmas gift to him in 1950. Wyeth wore them while taking long walks to regain his strength. He explained: "The painting came to signify to me a close relationship between critical illness and the refusal to accept it—a kind of stalking away."
Both his shoulder muscles and his health knitted back together, although he still cannot get life insurance. Since then, Wyeth, along with finishing two or three temperas a year, has set himself to continuing the dynasty. His eldest son, Nicky, 20, is a freshman at Delaware's Wesley Junior College and plans to go into art dealing. Afternoons, Wyeth teaches the family trade to his other son, Jamie, 17. So fast has Jamie learned painting that the proceeds from his work sit in front of the staid Wyeth house like a visitor from Mars—a red-hot Corvette Sting Ray. Says Wyeth, "Some day I'll be known as James Wyeth's father."
The taste with which the Wyeths live is as high as the taste of their art. Says a family friend: "Their house, the way the table is set, even the food they eat are all done with a lack of pretense, a genuineness, a judgment that is a delight. Between the pictures and their lives, there is no break." On Thanksgiving, the clan gathers until there are often 20 at table. Betsy cooks up a storm straight out of the Gourmet Cookbook, and—though she might still chill them—there are vintage French burgundies to add some thunder. A frequent visitor over the years is Brother-in-Law Hurd, a New Mexico painter of Western landscapes, who years ago taught Wyeth how to paint with tempera. Together, though, they are more apt to top each other's tall tales than talk art.