The Brandywine Museum of Stearns' Visit.5

Stearns and I visited the Brandywine Museum in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, about 45 minutes away from Philadelphia. It is a happily situated museum that is rich in local art. The architecture of the museum itself isn't too pretty from the outside, but from the inside looking out, it gives panoramic views of the Brandywine river. The museum's architecture is Frank Lloyd Wright-esque, from the way that it opens up wide vistas to the water, to the white curving floors that open in the center, which are reminiscent of the Guggenheim.

The museum is great at focusing on a few small topics, such as American illustrators and the Wyeths. And these topics tie easily together: N.C Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth's father, was taught by Howard Pyle, an important American illustrator. (Above--N.C. Wyeth's early illustration of Treasure Island.)

Andrew Wyeth is excellent at capturing Pennsylvania and the brown scale that characterizes it from December to March. He works his magic and even makes that brown scale a little beautiful. As he notes in his reflections on the painting above, his work is not like a photograph, which is funny, given the realism of the colors. There's something lumpy about many figures in his work, for instance. Or the way that the dog's paw (below), doesn't quite rest right.



Almost the whole Wyeth family was immensely artistically talented, even the men whom the daughters married. Andrew Wyeth's son, Jamie, continues the family tradition. His painting of a pig, below amused me: He decided to paint the pig after it ate something like 21 tubes of paint and survived. The pig's feces were brightly colored. You can't really see it in this picture, but the original painting incorporates lots of bright colors in the pig's hair and skin, as if to remind the viewer of the story of the pig eating the paint.

When we visited the museum, which was on Sunday morning when admission is free, there were lots of children there with their families. Because the museum wasn't crowded, the children were actually great to have there. One little girl ran up to this pig picture, exclaiming, I imagine, that it's a pig, in whatever language she was speaking.

These two portraits of cows are great; they are hung grandly side by side, as if they were elegant people. I think that that's one of the themes of the museum--the dignity of cows.