Andrew Wyeth valuation
Painted the fields, farmhouses and neighbours of Chadds Ford and coastal Maine in egg tempera and drybrush watercolour.
Andrew Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1917, the youngest of the five children of the illustrator N. C. Wyeth, who taught him at home.
What a work by Andrew Wyeth is worth
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Bio
Andrew Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1917, the youngest of the five children of the illustrator N. C. Wyeth, who taught him at home. He spent his life between Chadds Ford and his summer house at Cushing in Maine, painting the land and the people around both in watercolour, drybrush and egg tempera. His father's death at a railway crossing in 1945 gave his work a darker cast. Christina's World, painted in 1948 and bought by the Museum of Modern Art the following year, became one of the best-known American paintings of the century. His wife Betsy managed his career, and their son Jamie is a painter. He received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in 1963 and died at Chadds Ford in 2009.
Wyeth was prolific in watercolour and drybrush, and these make up most of what comes to market, along with drawings and studies; the temperas are fewer, and many are in museums. Buyers look for a history back to the artist or his dealers, and for the exhibition record.
Chadds Ford, Cushing and the Helga pictures
The Helga pictures, 247 studies of his neighbour Helga Testorf made between 1971 and 1985 and kept from public view, caused a sensation when they were revealed in 1986 and were shown at the National Gallery of Art in Washington in 1987.
The Brandywine River Museum of Art at Chadds Ford and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, hold large collections of his work, and the Kuerner Farm and the Olson House, the setting of Christina's World, are open to visitors.
Tempera, drybrush and the windows
He learned figure drawing and watercolour from his father and egg tempera from his brother-in-law, Peter Hurd, and avoided oil paint all his life. His first exhibition, of watercolours at the Macbeth Gallery in New York in 1937, sold out when he was twenty. Drybrush, watercolour worked almost dry in fine strokes, sits between the loose watercolours and the slow temperas, and Garret Room of 1962 was begun in one and finished in the other.
Windows were an obsession: he made about three hundred drawings and paintings of them, and the National Gallery of Art showed sixty in Looking Out, Looking In in 2014. Almost the whole Helga series was bought in 1986 by the Philadelphia publisher Leonard Andrews and kept together. He was the first painter to receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom, received the Congressional Gold Medal in 1988, and was the first American artist since John Singer Sargent elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts.
Best auction results
- Day Dream $23.3m
- Tempera, 1980 · New York · 9 November 2022
- Publicly reported
- From the collection of Paul G. Allen. The artist's auction record.
- Ericksons $10.3m
- Tempera on panel, 1973 · New York · May 2007
- Publicly reported
- The record until 2022.
Results as reported at the time of sale, inclusive of buyer's premium. They are a record of what specific works achieved on specific days, not a guide to what any other work is worth.
Whitebank Fine Art is an art advisory and gallery, not an auction house, and is not affiliated with any auction house or with the artist, their estate or their representatives. This page describes the range we advise on. Nothing here is investment advice.
