Sunday, November 11, 2018
The Patriot
Raymond H. Geselbracht, "The Ghosts of Andrew Wyeth: The Meaning of Death in the Transcendental Myth of America," New England Quarterly 47.1 (March, 1974) 13-29 (at 20, footnotes omitted):
Like Thoreau, Wyeth thought it wiser to look west rather than east for inspiration. He is drawn neither to the city nor to Europe. "I'm just a country boy," he says. "I think I'll stay right here in Chadds Ford out of all the hullabaloo." He rejects the urgings of friends that he must go to Europe to find profound subjects. "To me that's inane," he answers. "If you want something profound, the American countryside is exactly the place." Europe, he feels, could only take something away. "I might lose something very important to my work," he says, "maybe innocence. And anyway, all those poops come back from Europe, I don't see where they're so damned deeper in what they do. Seems to me they get thinner." He holds up as an example of his meaning his picture The Patriot (1964) — "There's a certain awkward, primitive quality in that portrait," he maintains, "I feel could only have been done by an American." And, one might add, this portrait could only have been done by an American who does not live in the city. In New York City, for example, Wyeth finds only "a little bit of this and that ... a watered-down human being." The original of The Patriot, however — Ralph Cline of Cushing, Maine — is "an essence absolutely in a being," Wyeth says. "There's something about an apple that's pure McIntosh that hasn't been cross-bred with other apples."All of the quotations come from Richard Meryman, "Andrew Wyeth," Life, LVIII, 116 (May 14, 1965).
