Wyeth paintings owned by L.L. Bean’s granddaughter are up for auction

When L.L. Bean’s granddaughter, Linda L. Bean, stumbled upon a book of Chadds Ford artist N.C. Wyeth’s letters at an antiques show in 1992, it ignited a lifelong fascination with the Wyeth family of artists, resulting in a collection of 20 of their paintings estimated at more than $3 million dollars.

Now the late Bean’s private collection of Wyeth works — including paintings by Newell Convers (better known as N.C.), Andrew, Jamie, and others — will be auctioned online and in New York City on Tuesday by Bonhams, a global network of auction houses headquartered in London.

Among the pieces expected to fetch the highest bids is Unknown (Coastal Scene with Apple Tree in Foreground), an oil painting of Port Clyde, Maine, by N.C. Wyeth from around 1936, that’s estimated at between $1.2 and $1.8 million, according to Bonhams.

Many of the Wyeth works in Bean’s collection are of scenes and people in Maine, where Bean was a lifelong resident until her death in March at the age of 82. It is also where the Wyeth family spent summers starting in 1920, when N.C. bought a home in Port Clyde he named “Eight Bells,” after a famous Winslow Homer painting.

Bean lived in Port Clyde the last 17 years of her life, where she ran the “Wyeths by Water” boat tour, the Dip Net Restaurant, and the town’s General Store, above which she created the Maine Wyeth Art Gallery. All three were destroyed in a fire last year along with three original Jamie Wyeth paintings, an original N.C. Wyeth illustration, and a trove of books, prints, and other memorabilia, according to the Portland Press Herald.

In 2018, Bean founded the N.C. Wyeth Research Foundation and Reading Libraries, which includes properties in Port Clyde and Chadds Ford. She was also a former trustee at the Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, where there is a gallery named after her.

It’s not clear how close Bean was to members of the Wyeth family. The patriarch, N.C. Wyeth, a renowned painter and illustrator who was Bean’s favorite, died in 1945 when his car was hit by a train at railroad crossing in Chadds Ford.

According to the New York Times, Bean met at least once with Andrew Wyeth, N.C.’s son and a celebrated artist in his own right, during a visit to the Wyeth family farm in Chadds Ford. Jamie Wyeth, Andrew’s son who’s also a famous painter and portrait artist, told the Times Bean had a “big heart” but said (while laughing) “her obsessiveness with the Wyeths can be intrusive.”

Other Wyeth works owned by Bean being auctioned next week include Self Portrait in Top Hat and Cape, an oil painting by N.C. Wyeth which dates to around 1927 and is valued at $400,000 to $600,000; The Gam, a 1938 watercolor-and-graphite work on paper of boaters in Maine by Andrew Wyeth, estimated between $100,000 and $150,000; and Dead Cat Museum, Monhegan Island, a 1999 oil portrait by Jamie Wyeth of a boy on Maine’s Monhegan Island with a handwritten sign that reads: “Kyle’s Dead Cat Museum. See the Cats 50 Cents, Lemonade 10 Cents. Nintendo (no accessories) $10-20. Mackerel …” The piece is estimated at between $300,000 and $500,000.

Additional works by those artists and other members of the Wyeth family, including Anne Wyeth McCoy and Henriette Wyeth, will be included in the auction and can be found online at Bonhams.com.

Along with being a family shareholder in the outdoor gear company founded by her grandfather, Leon Leonwood Bean, and serving on its board of directors for almost 50 years, Linda Bean was also in the wholesale lobster business and had two failed runs as a conservative Republican candidate in Maine for the U.S. House of Representatives.

In 2017, Bean gave $60,000 to Make America Great Again LLC, a PAC supporting former president Donald Trump, which triggered scrutiny because contributions were limited to $5,000 under the law, according to the Hill.