Nigel Havers’s favourite painting
The actor chooses a dramatic, thought-provoking American work
ANDREW WYETH was the youngest of the five children of the American artist N. C. Wyeth, also a famous illustrator. Summers were spent on the Maine coast, the rest of the year in rural Pennsylvania, a practice followed by his son.
His father’s sociability and celebrity meant guests included the likes of Scott Fitzgerald and the Hollywood star Mary Pickford. Similar achievement was expected of the children, especially of Andrew, a sickly child who was educated at home by his father: ‘Pa kept me almost in a jail.’
Only the best was good enough. His father despised illustration compared with painting: illustration had to adapt to the practical demands of engravers and printers; instead of ‘inner feeling, you express the outward thought’.
True to his father’s instruction, Andrew was a dogged independent, an upholder of craft and a disdainer of fashion. Accordingly, he was marmite to critics. The American art historian Robert Rosenblum, asked to nominate the most underrated and over-rated 20th-century artists, named only Wyeth—twice.
It was typical that Wyeth’s favourite technique was egg tempera, as used in Renaissance frescoes and here. ‘It’s a dry pigment mixed with distilled water and yoke of egg… Tempera is something with which I build—like building in great layers the way the earth itself was built. Tempera is not the medium of swiftness.’
Adrift is the opposite of Wyeth’s American contemporaries’ enthusiasm for abstract Action painting and its self-absorbed legacy. It is a tempera tour de force.
In 1978, he painted an old man lying apparently asleep in a melting Pennsylvanian snowdrift. Here, he sets an old man adrift on the ocean. Has the mind been set free, or the spirit? Or both?