The Brandywine Museum of Art is currently showing Human Nature, a selection of work by Andrew Wyeth focused on the human form. The museum has an extensive collection of the artist’s paintings and often has shows focused on him and his artistic family.

From the museum about this exhibition-

One of the artist Andrew Wyeth’s enduring legacies is his highly original response to the subject of the human body. Alongside his iconic landscapes and visionary responses to buildings, botany, and beyond, his figure paintings and drawings offer particular insight into how this unique creative journey took shape, and how he was connected to the history of art.

The rarely seen paintings and drawings on view in Human Nature reveal an artist who was steeped in the tradition of Western art, engaged in a diligent study of the human form via the long-tested methods of sketching from live models and plaster casts, and who found in his portrait subjects ways of evoking enigmatic narratives and inner lives.

The works in this exhibition, drawn from the Brandywine and Wyeth Foundation collections as well as one exciting loan from a private collection, present a unique opportunity to understand Wyeth’s eye. Case studies include early figure drawings made in his father’s studio, self-portraits, intimate depictions of close family members, a little known and fascinating body of commissioned portraits, a broad representation of his mature practice including many major figural temperas and watercolors, and a final section on how he approached the nude figure. One highlight is the loan of Wyeth’s portrait of Professor Joyce Hill Stoner, a leading art conservator who shares in the exhibition’s wall texts some firsthand reflection on the process of being painted by Wyeth. Visitors will come away with new understanding of a remarkable lifelong practice that clarifies the operations and values at work across his art.

The painting above is of Adam Johnson who raised chickens and pigs a short walk from Wyeth’s studio in Chadds Ford. When this was painted, Wyeth had already known him for thirty years. Other interesting paintings in the show include the two very different portraits of Wyeth’s sister Ann, from earlier in his career, pictured below.

From the museum about these two works-

As a young artist, Wyeth made a few dozen works in oil on canvas before abandoning this medium for good. There is a stark difference between the two portraits of pianist and composer Ann Wyeth, the artist’s sister, made three years apart. This depiction is handled very freely, in contrast to the more tightly painted tempera to the right, in which the artist and, by extension, the viewer loom over the subject in a most unsettling way while Ann Wyeth ignores our gaze in her peripheral vision.

This exhibition closes 6/15/25. A new exhibition of Wyeth works, Andrew Wyeth at Kuerner Farm: The Eye of the Earth, will open on 6/22.