LB2017.19.5266

LB2017.19.5266

Andrew Wyeth sits in the grass with his eldest sister Henriette and her husband Peter Hurd at Andrew's home in Cushing Maine. Henriette Wyeth (1907- 1997) was the eldest of N.C. Wyeth’s five children. She was an artist, known for her portraits and floral compositions. She also taught drawing and painting. At age 3 Henriette contracted polio, which affected her ability to use her right hand, but she pursued her artist career undaunted, learning to draw with her left hand and getting creative with how to hold a paint brush with her right. She grew up in Chadds Ford, PA, went to Quaker schools, and later was home schooled. She was taught painting by her father, celebrated illustrator N.C. Wyeth. In 1929, Henriette married artist Peter Hurd and they moved to New Mexico near his hometown. Henriette was conservative in her views and critical of television and modern society. Peter Hurd (1904 – 1984) was a painter. He worked in a realist style and was known for painting portraits and landscapes of New Mexico. Peter studied with N.C. Wyeth and married Wyeth’s eldest daughter Henriette, also a painter. They had three children together. As a war correspondent for Life Magazine during WWII, he went up in bombers and painted first person views looking out of the cockpit. Peter loved the outdoors and horseback riding, and was a skilled polo player, from his time at West Point. He celebrated and documented the people and landscapes of the southwest in paintings and lithographs, and also on an album of Spanish folk songs which he recorded. Ruohomaa met American realist painter Andrew Wyeth in 1947 through their mutual acquaintance, the sculptor George Curtis. The two enjoyed a long friendship and had a few eccentric adventures (see "Kosti Ruohomaa: Andrew Wyeth Collects a Hearse" and "Kosti Ruohomaa: Andrew Wyeth's Deserted House"). Arguably, they also shared some artistic affinities. For example, each had his own way of imbuing otherwise ordinary scenes with complex emotion, and both men often seemed to view their subjects as elemental forces. The painter invited the photographer to his family's summer home in Cushing, Maine for a visit of several days in June and July of 1951. The occasion yielded some notable portraits of Wyeth and his family; in effect, Ruohomaa was able to study Wyeth in one of his native habitats.