Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth

The most private of artists was beguiled by a hardscrabble farm and its residents down the road from his studio, revealing some of his most personal friendships, and yielding some of his most iconic paintings.

Andrew Wyeth first discovered the haunting beauty of the farm owned by German immigrants Karl and Anna Kuerner on his boyhood rambles in Pennsylvania’s bucolic Brandywine River Valley, and it would captivate him for the rest of his life, appearing as subject of more than one thousand landscapes, interiors, and portraits. As traced throughout this volume, just what Wyeth uncovered beneath the farm’s austere facade is key to understanding his singular artistic vision.

This intimate look at Wyeth’s decades-long connection to Kuerner Farm and the people there reveals not only the source of many of the artist’s most deeply resonant paintings but also the secrets that have given his deceptively simple art its mysterious pull on the popular imagination for generations. As Wyeth became one of the country’s most celebrated artists, he continued to return to the farm, the Kuerners, and to the enigmatic Helga Testorf, creating timeless portraits from an experience of deep looking and charting a way toward unearthing from the ordinary, the extraordinary.

William L. Coleman is the Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Brandywine Museum of Art. Allison C. Slaby is curator at Reynolda House Museum of American Art. Karen Baumgartner is collection manager of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Brandywine Museum of Art. James Welling is a contemporary American artist and photographer.