At age 20, Andrew Wyeth became a celebrity. Within 24 hours of his first one-man show at the Macbeth Gallery in New York City, which opened on October 19, 1937, all 23 of his watercolours – most of which he had painted around Port Clyde, Maine – had sold. Reminiscent of Winslow Homer’s watercolours, these works, with their explosive temperament and execution, communicated Andrew’s irrepressible desire to paint. He had internalised the verve and brio of these sheets so entirely that he painted another one from memory more than a year later, when he gave a watercolour lesson to a group of women assembled at the Howard Pyle Studio in Wilmington, Delaware.
His urge to lay down pigments in a variety of manners, as well as to overcome the challenges…
