Dressed up for the end

“Dr. Syn” (tempera on panel), by Andrew Wyeth, in the show “Andrew Wyeth: Life and Death,’’ at the Colby College Museum of Art, Waterville, Maine, through Oct. 16.

The museum says that famed painter Wyeth (1917-2009) envisions his own funeral in the recently rediscovered series of drawings from the 1990s. "The exhibition connects the sketches now known as the Funeral Group to Wyeth’s decades-long engagement with death as an artistic subject in painting, his relationships with the models depicted, and his expressive and exploratory use of drawing." Wyeth lived on the Maine Coast for much of his life.

About the title: The Reverend Doctor Christopher Syn is the smuggler hero of a series of novels by Russell Thorndike. The first book, Doctor Syn: A Tale of the Romney Marsh, was published in 1915. The story idea came from smuggling in the 18th-century Romney Marsh, in England, where brandy and tobacco were brought in at night by boat from France to avoid taxes.

'Doorway to the sea'

“Christina’s World,’’ by Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009), the very popular American “realist “ painter. The woman in the painting, Anna Christina Olson (1893-1968), had a degenerative muscular disorder that prevented her from walking after she was 30. She refused to use a wheelchair, so she would crawl. The house and barn are in Cushing, Maine, where the Wyeth family had a summer house.

“The world of New England is in that house – spidery, like crackling skeletons rotting in the attic – dry bones. It’s like a tombstone to sailors lost at sea, the Olson ancestor who fell from the yardarm of a square-rigger and was never found. It’s the doorway of the sea to me, of mussels and clams and sea monsters and whales.’’

-- Painter Andrew Wyeth, on the home of his model Christina Olson, in Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life (1996), by Richard Meryman

The Olson House in 1995. The house and its occupants, Christina and Alvaro Olson, were depicted in paintings and sketches by Wyeth from 1939 to 1968. The house was designated a National Historic Landmark in June 2011. The Farnsworth Art Museum, in Rockland, Maine, owns the house, which is open to the public.

To see the bone structure

"Winter 1946'' (tempera), by Andrew Wyeth.

"I prefer winter and fall, when you feel the bone structure of the landscape - the loneliness of it, the dead feeling of winter.  Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show." 

--   Andrew Wyeth

Mr. Wyeth was famous for his paintings set in Maine and Pennsylvania.

Woodland meditation

"Seated by a Tree'' (watercolor on paper, 1973)), by Andrew Wyeth, in the show "Andrew Wyeth: Drawings and Watercolors,'' at the Adelson Galleries, Boston, opening April 15.

Those woods look like those a week before they leaf out in April.

Only three (or four) more months!

 

"Breakup'' (tempera on panel), by ANDREW WYETH, at Adelson Galleries, Boston.

Art appreciation on Federal Hill

 

Commentary and photograph by WILLIAM MORGAN

Christina Olson, the cripple depicted in Andrew's Wyeth's 1948 painting "Christina's World, '' has moved beyond the iconic, even beyond kitsch, to the commonplace – as ubiquitous as the "Mona Lisa ''or "Whistler's Mother''.

Still, her appearance as a bit of graffiti on a utility meter box is a bit jarring. A purple house with orange highlights in Luongo Memorial Square , in the Federal Hill section of Providence,  suggests that the neighborhood is having a renaissance. Or at least educated people who will get the reference are moving in.