Windmill

Provenance

The artist

Private collection, acquired from above, 1948

Sale, Sotheby’s, New York, New York, April 16, 2014, lot 110

Private collection

Avery Galleries, Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania

Related Works

Brandywine Valley, 1940, watercolor on paper, 21⅞ x 30 1/16 inches, signed lower right; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

The Road to Friendship, 1941, watercolor on paper, 22¾ x 30½ inches; Farnsworth Art Museum, Rockland, Maine

East Friendship, Maine, ca. 1945, watercolor on paper, 21⅝ x 29½ inches, signed lower left; National Gallery of Art, Washington, DC

Note: This painting will be included in the forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist’s work by Betsy James Wyeth.

Thought to have been completed when the artist was only nineteen years old, this work marks an early attention to watercolor. Later speaking on the medium, Andrew Wyeth expressed, “The only virtue to a watercolor is to put down an idea very quickly without too much thought about what you feel at the moment. In some senses it is similar to drawing but drawing in all aspects of color. With watercolor, you can pick up the atmosphere, the temperature, the sound,” continuing, “watercolor perfectly expresses the free side of my nature.”_[1]

_[1] Andrew Wyeth, interview with Thomas Hoving, quoted in Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1976), 33.