USPS to honor Andrew Wyeth’s centennial

July 12 marks the centennial of Chadds Ford artist’s birth

The United States Postal Service will issue a pane of stamps in 2017 inspired by the art of Andrew Wyeth.

CHADDS FORD » The United States Postal Service has announced that it will issue a pane of stamps in 2017 inspired by the art of Andrew Wyeth to commemorate the centennial of the artist’s birth. Wyeth was born and spent his life in Chadds Ford, Delaware County, home of the Brandywine River Museum of Art, which displays American art, including work by three generations of the Wyeth family, and offers tours of the artist’s studio.

The official dedication ceremony for the stamps will take place at the Brandywine River Museum of Art on Wednesday, July 12 at 10 a.m., 100 years to the day that Andrew Wyeth was born. This event is free and open to the public.

This pane of 12 Forever stamps celebrates the centennial of the birth of Andrew Wyeth (July 12, 1917 – Jan. 16, 2009), one of the most prominent American artists of the 20th century. Working in a realistic style that defied artistic trends, Wyeth created haunting and enigmatic paintings based largely on people and places in his life, a body of work that continues to resist easy or comfortable interpretation.

This issuance includes stamps that each features a detail from a different Andrew Wyeth painting. The paintings are: “Wind from the Sea” (1947), “Big Room” (1988), “Christina’s World” (1948), “Alvaro and Christina” (1968), “Frostbitten” (1962), “Sailor’s Valentine” (1985), “Soaring” (1942–1950), “North Light” (1984), “Spring Fed” (1967), “The Carry” (2003), “Young Bull” (1960), and “My Studio” (1974).

Derry Noyes served as art director and designer

for this stamp sheet.

Forever stamps were created by the United States Postal Service in 2007. They are non-denominational First Class postage, which means that they can be used to mail First Class letters no matter what the postal rate. For example, in 2013 it cost 46 cents to mail a normal-sized letter weighing one ounce or less to an address within the United States. In 2014, the rate increased to 49 cents. Customers who purchased

Forever Stamps in 2013 at the rate of 46 cents each may still use those stamps to mail their First Class letters today without adding additional postage to the envelope.

Andrew Wyeth lived in Chadds Ford while typically spending each summer and early fall in Maine. In both places, he was inspired by the lives, houses, and personal belongings of the people around him, finding particular interest in the German immigrants on a nearby Chadds Ford farm, painting portraits of them and views in and around their home. By the 1940s,

the tendencies that define much of his work were taking shape, among them a focus on death and loss; the uses of places and objects to serve as stand-ins for people, and intense and unsentimental scrutiny of nature, and an often startling austerity and stark lack of color. Rather than depict nature with photographic accuracy, Wyeth used painting to convey emotions that were difficult to put into words. His work often reflected memories, associations, and echoes from his personal life, including his own distinctive sense of the wondrous and the strange.

SUBMITTED IMAGE The new Andrew Wyeth Forever stamps.