TODAY'S MASTERS Phyllis and Jamie Wyeth had been married for more than 50 years when Phyllis died in 2019. Beginning even before their marriage, Jamie painted her portrait continuously, and she is also present in many “indirect portraits” — homages, really — to his partner, model, and ever-present muse.
An artist who once declared, “Everything I paint is a portrait,” might be seen by some as out of step with our everywhere, everything, all-at-once art world of postmodern eclecticism. Wyeth's direct antecedents — in addition to his father, Andrew, and grandfather N.C. — include the twin pillars of American portraiture, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent. Illustrated here, Sargent's small Capri Girl on a Rooftop (1878) — in the tenderness of its brushwork as well as the charged motif of…
