Elizabeth Meyer
Head of Auction Administration
Lot 57
Andrew Wyeth(1917-2009)Cornet 20 5/8 x 27 1/2in
22 November 2016, 14:00 EST
New YorkSold for US$199,500 inc. premium
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Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009)
Cornet
signed 'Andrew Wyeth' (lower left)
watercolor and pencil on paper
20 5/8 x 27 1/2in
Executed in 1992.
signed 'Andrew Wyeth' (lower left)
watercolor and pencil on paper
20 5/8 x 27 1/2in
Executed in 1992.
Footnotes
Provenance
The artist.
with Frank E. Fowler, Lookout Mountain, Tennessee.
Private collection, acquired from the above.
Gift to the present owner, 2006.
Exhibited
Greenville, South Carolina, Greenville County Museum of Art, and elsewhere, Andrew Wyeth: America's Painter, June 18, 1996-February 16, 1997, n.p., no. 20.
Literature
Contemporary Great Masters - Andrew Wyeth, Tokyo, 1993, n.p., illustrated.
This work will be included in Betsy James Wyeth's forthcoming catalogue raisonné of the artist's work.
For Andrew Wyeth it was the people, landscapes and symbols of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, that intrigued him most. Born in 1917, the son of the beloved illustrator Newell Convers Wyeth, he began to experiment with art and seek further education at a very young age. At twenty years old, in 1937, the artist secured his first solo-exhibition at Macbeth Gallery, in New York, which popularized his geographical landscapes that observed the Maine coast. His deeply personal connection to his subjects, whether they family members, neighbors, or locations in the Chadds Ford region of Delaware County, contributed to the autobiographical style that defined him as a favored Realist painter of the twentieth century.
Andrew Wyeth happened upon the home of Helen and George Sipala while working in the fields of Chadds Ford one day. After knocking on their door and asking to paint their impressive home, a mansion built in 1856, originally the Howard Pyle School of Illustration, and sensibly named Painter's Folly, the three became close friends. Helen Sipala, the model in the present work, appears in this composition dressed in a traditional nun's uniform – a cornette headpiece perched atop her and a white habit fastened at her neck. This work belongs among a series of watercolors, completed by the artist in 1992 featuring Sipala in the same costume. In Cornet, the sitter stares directly at the viewer, a rare posture for many of Wyeth's other models, her piercing green eyes never averting our gaze. Her face is highlighted with streaming light from a nearby window while her abstract headpiece casts shadow across her turned cheek. The Sipala's were also the subject of a tempera completed by the artist one year later, in 1993, titled Marriage, currently in a private collection. The couple remained close friends of Wyeth's until his death in 2009.
