Interpreting a Death-Inspired Painting by Andrew Wyeth Now on Display in Seattle

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Image of Andrew Wyeth's "Winter 1946" via Artists Rights Society.

Andrew Wyeth’s “Winter 1946” is part of an exhibit organized by the Seattle Art Museum and the Brandywine River Museum of Art for the centennial of the artist’s birth, writes Christopher Frizzelle for The Stranger, an alternative newspaper in Seattle.

The painting depicts Kuerner’s Hill, outside Chadds Ford, where the artist spent part of his childhood.

What cannot be seen is the railroad crossing behind the hill where Wyeth’s father and nephew were killed by a freight train that crashed into their car.

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“The landscape is synonymous with his father’s death,” said a museum curator.

Andrew Wyeth once said that he hated the fact that he did not paint his father when he was alive, and that this “hill finally became a portrait of him.”

Some people have speculated that the boy depicted in the painting is Allan Lynch, Wyeth’s childhood friend who discovered the bodies after the accident. However, Wyeth said the boy in the painting “was me, at a loss – that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping.”

Read more about Andrew Wyeth’s “Winter 1946” in The Stranger here.

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