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Betsy Wyeth
Betsy James Wyeth (née Betsy Merle James; 26 September 1921[1] - 21 April 2020)[2] was an author and art collector. She was also the business manager and archivist of her husband, artist Andrew Wyeth.[1] Early lifeBetsy Merle James was born on 26 September 1921 in East Aurora, New York.[2] She was the youngest of three daughters born to Elizabeth Browning, a graduate of Cornell and teacher of Latin, and Merle Davis James, an artist and printer.[1][2] She attended Colby Junior College, before transferring to the University of Chicago, where she studied archaeology.[2] In 1939, aged 17, she met 22 year old Andrew Wyeth.[2] They became engaged within a week of meeting, and married on 15 May 1940.[2][1] They settled in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.[2] The couple had two sons, Nicholas and Jamie.[2] Artistic collaborationPrior to their marriage, Betsy introduced Andrew Wyeth to the Olsons, a brother and sister.[2] Anna Christina Olson, paralyzed from the waist down, became the subject of one of Andrew Wyeth's best known works, titled Christina's World by Betsy.[2][3] Their son, Jamie, later said "I always felt her signature should be alongside his."[2] Andrew Wyeth said of his wife that she "made me into a painter I would not have been otherwise".[2] Betsy Wyeth became her husband's business manager, negotiating commissions, organizing shows, and maintaining his catalogue raisonné.[2] She described her role as like that of a film director.[2] She also regularly modelled for her husband, and was the subject of the portrait Maga’s Daughter.[2] Betsy Wyeth collected the letters of her father-in-law into a book, The Wyeths: The Letters of N.C. Wyeth, 1901-1945.[2][4] An artist like his son, the book helped to catalyze a reassessment of his career.[1] She wrote two books on Andrew Wyeth's work: Wyeth at Kuerners (1976), and Christina’s World (1982), and assisted in the 1995 documentary Andrew Wyeth Self Portrait: Snow Hill.[1][5] The Wyeths were significant benefactors in art and education.[1] In 1968, they founded the Wyeth Endowment for American Art (later the Wyeth Foundation for American Art).[1] Following Andrew Wyeth's death in 2009, Betsy Wyeth gifted his studio to the Brandywine River Museum of Art.[1] Preservation effortsBetsy Wyeth was a defender and restorer of the Brandywine region's vernacular architecture.[2] She helped to save a 19th-century gristmill by encouraging a neighbour, George Weymouth, to buy it and turn it into a museum.[2] This opened in 1971 as the Brandywine River Museum (now known as the Brandywine Museum of Art).[6] Wyeth also restored the old mill complex on the Brandywine River which became the couple's home and studio.[1] In Knox County, Maine, she bought three islands (Southern, Allen, and Benner), on one of which she restored a lighthouse.[2] Andrew Wyeth called the area "Betsy’s Village".[2] In 2008, she bought an old sail loft, previously dismantled in Port Clyde.[2] She had it put back together on one of the three islands, as a birthday gift for her husband.[2] The sail loft became the subject of one of Andrew Wyeth's paintings, and was renamed Goodbye by Besty following his death.[2] Allen and Benner islands were acquired by Colby College in 2022.[7] Betsy Wyeth was a founding member of the Chadds Ford Historical Society, and a driving force in the creation of Island Journal.[1][8] In 1987, she founded Up East Incorporated, to support environmental research, preservation, and education in Maine.[1] Death and legacyBetsy Wyeth died aged 98 on 21 April 2020 at her home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.[2] The Philadelphia Inquirer remembered her as "the chief architect of the Wyeth mystique".[9] Between 2020 and 2021, the Brandywine Museum of Art paid tribute to Betsy Wyeth's legacy with a display of 20 drawings and paintings of and about her.[10] In 2022, The Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine staged an exhibition titled Betsy's Gift.[4] A scholarship in her name, The Betsy James Wyeth Fellowship in Native American Art, is distributed by The Wyeth Foundation for American Art.[11] Since its formation in 2002, the Foundation has provided more than $10 million in financial support for art and artists.[12] Bibliography
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