Another Wyeth gets his due at the Brandywine

It all seems normal and matter-of-fact to Jamie Wyeth.

He enters his grandfather's old studio, a National Historic Landmark owned and operated by the Brandywine River Museum, and there is the familiar birch bark canoe suspended from the ceiling, high in the barnlike space.

There is the stuffed river otter, as fierce as ever; there, the model schooner; there, the carved bull's head, the horse head, the old camera, calipers, brushes, palette.

And on an easel, left exactly as it was when N.C. Wyeth died in 1945, is an unfinished portrait of George Washington on horseback.

Jamie Wyeth, now 68, never knew his grandfather. But the patriarch of the painting Wyeths of Chadds Ford and Brandywine country exerted enormous influence.

In this studio, as a small child, Jamie Wyeth drew and painted, beginning under the tutelage of his aunt, the painter Carolyn Wyeth, sister of Jamie's father, Andrew Wyeth.

Now, so many years later, Carolyn is gone, Andrew is gone, and Jamie Wyeth is a famous artist in his own right, with a massive career retrospective just opened at the Brandywine River Museum for a run through April 5.

He looks around his grandfather's studio on a rise in the woods, half a mile from the museum, and immediately spies an elaborate empty gilt frame, shaped like a pilastered fireplace.

"He made that frame for Captain Blood!" Wyeth exclaims. "The painting [The Duel on the Beach] is down at the National Geographic Society. .. . . But he made the frame for it - they should be together."

Wyeth shakes his head and looks around. His fingernails are covered with blue paint, his trousers splattered with blue and white. The room is flooded with north light from an enormous arched window.

The whole fantastic studio was built in 1911 by N.C. Wyeth, flush with funds from the triumph of his illustrations for Treasure Island.

"I actually studied here," Jamie Wyeth says. "Right in the corner is where I studied with my aunt. As a little boy, the place was empty and I'd come in and go through a lot. A lot of his paintings were still here, so it was fantastic. I'd go through all the Robin Hoods. It was magical. All the costumes were here. It was as if he'd just walked out. It doesn't look much different now.

"Then I'd go back to our house, which was my father's studio, and he'd be there painting a dead bird."

Wyeth laughs.

"So boring, you know, after having Treasure Island all morning!"

Jamie Wyeth stuck with the painting and drawing, despite the seeming burdens of legacy. He says he was not really troubled by comparisons to his father and grandfather.

"I loved their work," he says. "It would have been unnatural for me not to draw."

He shrugs off comparisons.

"Painting is such an individual profession," he says. "I'm not performing. There's no audience. I find painting difficult. I don't find it easy. So those problems surmounted the problems of . . . being compared. I always say I leave those things outside the studio."

Wyeth followed a sometimes bumpy early interest in portraiture. A 1963 portrait of pioneering pediatric cardiologist Helen Taussig was "a disaster" on its completion - when Wyeth was 17. The Johns Hopkins Medical School doctors who commissioned the work hated it - she looked almost fierce, not nurturing - and initially wanted it destroyed.

So, rather than hang it in the hospital, they gave it to Taussig, who promptly put it in her attic. At her death in 1986 it was almost destroyed again. But it survived and is now owned by Johns Hopkins; a copy hangs in the office of Janice E. Clements, the first female vice dean of Johns Hopkins faculty.

"I think they wanted women to be all Betty Crockers, and she was not," Wyeth recalls of the Taussig brouhaha. "She was very intense, with these incredible blue eyes. So I painted her as I saw her."

From Taussig, Wyeth continued with portraiture, eventually following his friend, impresario Lincoln Kirstein, to New York. Wyeth painted Kirstein, of course, and then fell in with Andy Warhol and the Factory crowd, and superstar dancer Rudolf Nureyev.

"Nureyev of all of them was probably the most difficult, in that he was more concerned, being a dancer, with his visage, what he looked like," Wyeth recalls. He obsessively drew and examined Nureyev.

"You measure so much you could make me a suit," the dancer huffed more than once.

Wyeth, in fact, was concerned he could never get the hyperkinetic Nureyev to sit for even a moment of sketching, so he found someone to use as a stand-in.

"Later we were at the studio [in New York] and I said to Rudolf, 'I've chosen this young man.' Well, he looked at this guy and said, 'Those pig legs for me?' The poor guy was completely shattered. . . . Then [Nureyev] said, 'I pose for me.' "

Nureyev, he said, was "a difficult and fascinating person" - flamboyant and mysterious. "He was, offstage, exactly what he was like onstage. He was very strange. Man or woman? Animal? He had this incredible intensity."

Warhol possessed a different kind of intensity, manipulative and childlike, calculating and inquisitive. He recorded everything. He and Wyeth would take long walks, often ending up at toy stores. Once they bought an electric train set.

Wyeth's portrait of Warhol captures the macabre look of a 50-year-old child, caught, says Wyeth, "like a deer in the headlights." Warhol, in turn, painted Wyeth as a glamorous star, naturally.

There is far more in the Brandywine retrospective of more than 100 works. Wyeth was invited to Cape Kennedy to paint a 1969 moon launch. He recorded Watergate proceedings in Judge John Sirica's courtroom.

And there are, of course, many, many paintings of animals and birds, and rural Wyeth farms and landscapes in Maine and near the Brandywine.

"People kind of put flags up and said, 'Well, you left, you went to New York,' and Warhol and all that," he says. "To me, it was a natural progression."

Jamie Wyeth

Through April 5 at the Brandywine River Museum, Hoffman's Mill Road and U.S. Route 1, Chadds Ford.

Hours: Daily, 9:30 a.m. to 4:30 p.m.

Admission: $15; 65 and over, $10; students and children 6-12, $6; 5 and under, free.

Information: 610-388-2700 or brandywinemuseum.org

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