Arts Feature: The Wyeth Stuff

The latest painting to be added to the Greenville County Museum of Art’s extensive Andrew Wyeth collection (hailed as one of his best publicly held watercolor collections in the country) has led a relatively sheltered life since its creation in 1946.

Four Poster came to the museum this spring as a gift from local businessman and textile mogul Roger Milliken. Originally a Christmas gift from Milliken to his wife, Nita, in 1948, the piece was seldom lent out from the walls of their home. It has been more than three decades since Four Poster was last displayed in the local art museum.

The drybrush watercolor depicts a bed and empty room inside a stone house, and it was created the year after Wyeth’s father (and first mentor) N.C. Wyeth died in a train accident, evoking the Pennsylvania-born painter’s understandable loneliness at his loss. Hanging next to the new piece is yet another recent acquisition: Eagle Quill, a study completed more than sixty years later that illustrates the evolution of Wyeth’s work.

Four Poster marks an impressive addition to the Greenville Museum’s thirty-five piece collection, which also includes an example of Wyeth’s early work, Under the Live Oaks, and spans an impressive seventy years of the artist’s career.

This summer is one of the few times that the entire Andrew Wyeth collection is on display at the museum, though, so don’t miss your chance to appreciate multiple works by “America’s Painter” close to home.

Want to go?
The Wyeth collection is on display until October 2009. Tuesday-Saturday, 11 a.m.-5 p.m.; Sunday, 1-5 p.m. Free. Visit www.greenvillemuseum.org or call (864) 271-7570.