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Negro boy named Doodoo Lawrence and inducted him into a Robin Hood band. Costumed in green and armed with bows, they would swoop down on some rich squire (such as a boy carrying groceries home), rob him and eat his riches in the forest. In Port Clyde, Maine, where the family spent the summers, Andy found another native nonconformist. Together they learned to handle a dory in heavy surf and to loot lobstermen's pots at night.
Breathing Hill. By 24, Wyeth was on the road to fame. His draftsmanship was skillful and his watercolor landscapes (which look thin and sloppy compared with his later work) had been exhibited and sold out more than once in Manhattan. More important, he had found and married a striking brunette named Betsy James, the daughter of a summer neighbor, who had made up her mind to be a helpful wife. They built a summer place at Gushing, near Port Clyde, took over an old schoolhouse in Chadds Ford for winter living.
One day old N. C. paid them a visit, began telling Andy how to paint a head, finally took the brush out of his son's hand and began to show him his idea. Betsy stood furiously by for a while, then walked out and slammed the door so hard the plaster fell from the ceiling. Next day N. C. came to Betsy and said, "I've been watching you for five years and you're all right, young lady. The stage is yours." He never interfered with Andy's work again.
After his father died, Andy, who had never done a portrait of him, painted a picture of a boy running downhill. "For me," Andy says, "the bulges of that hill seem to be breathing—rising and falling —almost as if my father was underneath them."
Useful Yolk. Wyeth's sister Henriette (herself a portraitist) had married Painter Peter Hurd—a fast friend of Andy's. Together Peter and Andy explored the meticulous egg-tempera technique, painting with small brushes on panels, which suits them both perfectly. The technique was standard during the Renaissance, and Wyeth says that "so much hokum has been written about it you feel you have to be a chemist to start on a picture." Wyeth's method is simple: for each day's work he mixes the yolk of one egg with a little distilled water, makes a paste of his powdered pigments.
The great advantage of egg-tempera is its precision. Thin and fast-drying, it permits none of the slick tricks that oil does, but is fine for detail work and for unobtrusively creating a sense of light. The sky in Wyeth's Young America, for example, has more air than paint about it.
Young America took six months to paint. Wyeth got the idea for it when he saw a Chadds Ford boy coming down the street on a shiny new bicycle covered with gadgets. "Somehow he seemed to express a great deal about America," says Andy. "I thought to myself, 'Now he thinks his bicycle is wonderful, but in a year he'll earn enough to buy himself a car.' I was struck by the freedom he represented—by distances in this country, the plains of the Little Bighorn and Custer and Daniel Boone and a lot of other things. I was excited by the motion of the bicycle too. The moving wheels were one of the most difficult things I ever painted. I called it Young America because it expressed in a way the vastness of America and American history."