Jamie Wyeth

James Browning Wyeth was born in 1946, the youngest child of Andrew Wyeth (one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century) and Betsy James Wyeth and the grandson of the famed illustrator N. C. Wyeth. At the age of twelve he began his formal art training with his aunt, Carolyn Wyeth, and two years later began instruction with his father, His first paintings appeared when he was seventeen, and he held his first major show at Knoedler's Gallery in New York before he had turned twenty. This book, whose publication was time to coincide with a major retrospective exhibit that was shown at thee important American museums, represents the first comprehensive publication of Jamie Wyeth's work. It contains many of his well-known portraits of such subjects as john F. Kennedy, Lincoln Kirstein, and Andrew Wyeth, along with some newer ones, notably Andy Warhol and Rudolf Nureyev, both of which are accompanied by revealing pre-studies. His animal portraits - including the famous one of his pig, Den Den - have extraordinary verve and variety, and even the woods and fields of Pennsylvania and the rocky shores of the Main coast take on specific personalities. Jamie Wyeth's work has an astonish power to attract the viewer immediately, but it sets up reverberations that linger on to haunt the mind long afterward.