“Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination,” on view Oct. 3, 2024-Jan. 5, 2025 at the Bruce Museum, explores the artist’s lifelong engagement with the natural world through his intimate observations of plant life as it evolves throughout the seasons. While Wyeth is most known and celebrated for his hyperrealistic watercolor and tempera paintings of people and landscapes, this exhibition shows the artist’s response to the natural world in a more visionary, poetic style.
“Every Leaf & Twig” features nearly 35 works on paper drawn from the holdings of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, with many on public display for the first time. Inspired by a line from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, “Walden, or Life in the Woods,” “Every Leaf & Twig” explores the artist’s lifelong admiration of the influential naturalist and highlights the distinctive painting style he developed through time spent alone in the natural world. The association between these two masters is particularly relevant at this moment when the fragile ecosystems that inspired them both are under threat.
Between his birthplace in the lush and temperate environment of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summers spent on the rocky and cool coast of Maine, Wyeth found in each environment a trove of imaginative potential. The varied specimens of flora he discovered while wandering through landscapes he knew so intimately provided both distinct shapes and colors to explore as well as intriguing stories and dramas revealed through his repeated observations of the same subjects throughout the year.
Organized by the Brandywine Museum of Art in association with the Farnsworth Art Museum and the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, “Every Leaf & Twig” is an exhibition in two parts. The first part was exhibited at the Farnsworth and focused on Wyeth’s paintings in Maine. The second part, exhibited at the Brandywine, focused on work the artist created in Pennsylvania. The Bruce will be the first venue to unite these two presentations in one location, offering visitors a more complete representation of Wyeth’s botanical canon.
As an institution, the Bruce Museum highlights the intersections of art and science. This presentation will address the environmental stakes of Wyeth’s botanical drawings and watercolors, both as visual records of species and environments threatened by contemporary ecological crises, and of his own creative study and stewardship of these fragile — and deeply personal — ecosystems.
“We are thrilled to partner with the Brandywine Museum of Art to present ‘Every Leaf & Twig’ at the Bruce,” said Margarita Karasoulas, curator of art. “Although lesser known, Wyeth’s botanical watercolors have all the visual hallmarks of the artist’s style: precise detail, bold color and dramatic contrasts of light and shadow. They offer intimate, even microscopic, views of plant life that reveal Wyeth to be a sensitive interpreter of the natural world. We are excited to show these rarely seen works at the Bruce and to highlight the exhibition’s unique ecocritical approach to this well-known artist.”
“Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination” will be on view in the Vicki Netter Fitzgerald Gallery. Support for the exhibition is provided by the Connecticut Department of Economic and Community Development, Connecticut Humanities and the Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund.
Andrew Wyeth, “Buttonwood, Study for The Hunter,” 1943. Drybrush watercolor, 19 ½ x 29 ½ in. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, B0575r © 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Andrew Wyeth, “Coot Hunter Study,” 1941. Watercolor, 21 ½ x 29 ⅜ in. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, M1059 © 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Andrew Wyeth, “Rose Hips,” 1981. Watercolor, 13 x 22 ¼ in. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, M1978 © 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York
Andrew Wyeth, “Secret,” 2008. Watercolor, 24 x 30 in. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art. © 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York