Brandywine Museum

The Brandywine River Art Museum is a small museum in Chadd's Ford, Pennsylvania,

the home of the Wyeth family of painters for several generations.  Works by all seven 

members of the family are here, as well as special exhibits.  The building was originally 

an old mill on the Brandywine River.  A modern addition with new galleries has been

added in back.

This is the beautiful sun-filled circular atrium connecting the two buildings

and offering views of the Brandywine River below.

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Rural Modern: American Art Beyond the City

Dale Nichols "Summer's Bounty"  1941

This was a special exhibit which explored the adaptation of modernist styles to subject

matter associated with the American countryside.  Treatments of coastal New England,

small-town Pennsylvania, and other rural regions of the country illustrated the spread of

modernist styles such as Cubism and Fauvism. as well as the transformation of these

styles into an American vernacular modernism.

Nichols was from Nebraska and his paintings were widely reproduced on products

ranging from puzzles to plates.  He was a close friend of Rockwell.

Paul Sample.  "Tardy."  1935

Sample took a simple, rural theme of one room schoolhouse and child running to it,
but simplified all the forms and reduced them to geometric shapes and used large areas
of flat color, like the modernists in Paris.  There no longer is the graduated shading of a
"realistic" style for grass or rocks or sand or distance, trying to imitate what the eye sees.

John Steuart Curry  "The Old Folks"  1926

Curry was from Kansas and a leader of the Regionalist School, along with

Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton.  This was a portrait of his parents.

Thomas Hart Benton   "The Tobaccco Sorters"  1942

Benton's historical and contemporary works were widely admired.  He and several other 

Regionalist artists were approached by the American Tobacco Company to create

 promotional images which could be used for advertising for cigarettes.   He spent

several weeks in Georgia and North Carolina making sketches to be as accurate as

possible, but his work was eventually rejected by the company.

Edward Firn  "County Fair"  1935

This was one of several paintings Firn made after traveling through Kentucky.

The ladies ae judging jars of pickled vegetables at a local fair.  the patterns of the

quilts on the wall recall Matisse and the cups reference Cezanne.  The tight-lipped

lady in the center is meant to be viewed humorously.

Roger Medearis  "The Farmer Takes a Wife"  1941

Medearis was a student of Thomas Hart Benton at the Kansas City Art Museum.

The title recalls the children's song, but with a comical twist.

Dale Nichols  "Spring Turning"  1946

Nichols worked as a farmer for 20 years in Nebraska before setting off for Chicago

to study at the Art Institute and become an artist.  He said he painted farms

because he knew them so well.

Anna Mary Robertson "Grandma Moses"  "Collecting the Maple Sugar"  1938

Grandma Moses were popular partly because she represented an "authentic" American

view, rather than an elitist European style.  Certainly my mother loved this painting because it reminded her of her childhood when everyone went into the woods to the collect the syrup,

then boil it in big tubs.  The children were allowed to spill some of it on the snow where it 

quickly hardened and became instant candy.

John Rogers Cox  "Wheatfield"   1943

John Roger depicts the vast fields of wheat in the Midwest with only a speck of a house

on the horizon.  He remembered the sound of the wind in the wheat as it whistled through

the heads of grain.  It was almost like the ocean in its power, he thought.

Grant Woods  "Appraisal"  1931

Grant Woods of Iowa used modernist techniques of sharp lines, patterns, flat

areas of color, and geometric forms to also comment on the relationship of city

and country.  This is during the Depression.  A city lady has come out to a farm to

buy a chicken for cooking.  The farm wife considers her carefully before giving a price.

Roger Medearis  "Godly Susan"  1941

A portrait of the young artist's grandmother, Susan, an upstanding member of the

local Baptist church, where the painter's father was preacher.

Horace Pippin  "Floral Piece - Still Life"

Pippin was an African-American painter who went to Paris to study the latest styles

He returned to America and painted simple scenes of life in the Black communities

in rural settings.

Horace Pippin  "Birmingham Meeting House"

The solid geometric forms and simple shapes are typical of a modernist style.

James Brooks  "Oklahoma Barber Shop"  1931

Brooks later on became an artist of Abstract Expressionism, but in 1933 and 1934 he painted

a series of small works of life in Oklahoma and Texas, such as this simple shop, often 

showing the decaying architecture of the Depression.

George Ault  "Bright Lights at Russell's Corners"  1946

Ault lived with his family in London for several years and was influenced by Cubism

and Surrealism, both of which appear here in this deserted crossroads of a town.

Ralston Crawford  "White Barn"  1936

Crawford helped develop the Precisionist Style based on geometric forms and

simplified forms, which he employs here is the rural environment of Exton, Pennsylvania,

not far from this museum.

Ralston Crawford  "Steel Mill - Coatesville, PA"  1937

Crawford's paintings became increasingly flat and linear, more abstract.  This mill

was located in the rolling hills of Chester County in Eastern Pennsylvania near Exton.

Dale Nichols.  "When the Grass Grows Green."  1937

Although Nichols criticized modern, abstract art, he used many of the new

techniques in this painting of grain elevators in simple, solid geometric shapes and

large, flat areas of color.

Stuart Davis  "New Mexico Landscape"  1943

Artist also discovered the Southwest and its vast spaces.  Stuart usually painted

in the Cubist style, and here he flattens space and uses three strong planes to

divide his painting - foreground with houses, middle ground with desert, and

distance with mountains.

Marsden Hartley.  "New Mexico Landscape."   1920

Hartley also discovered and fell in love with the Southwest at this time.

Here he shows the influence of Cezanne in the solid forms he creates for

the rocks and mountains and the compresses space.

Andrew Dasburg.  "Placito Sanctuario."  1924.

Dasburg was fascinated by the simple, solid adobe buildings of the natives and

of the churches.  He, Georgia O'Keefe, and Anselm Adams all worked with this theme.

Marsden Hartley.  "Window - New Mexico."

Hartley here combines the modernist still life of the Cubists with the simplified

forms and compressed space of the modernists.

Charles Demuth  "Buildings Abstraction - Lancaster"  1931

Demuth also worked in rural Pennsylvania and showed in his works how

modernist styles and rural subject matter worked together well.

Charles Demuth  "End of the Parade"

DeScott Evans  "Free Samples - Try Some"

Evans was an African-American artist who often used trompe l'oeil techniques

like this one, to trick the eye, but with everyday objects.

William Michael Harnett.  "A Man's Table."

This still life is typical of "barroom art."

Alexandre Hogue.  "The Crucified Land"   1939

Hogue used his paintings to show the agricultural problems of the Dust Bowl.

The painting shows aht poor farming does - all the furrows head down and all the soil

washed away, when a smart farmer would have used contour plowing to save the soil. 

Ben Shahn.  "Farmers."  1943

During the Depression, Lithuanian-born Ben Shahn was hired by

several New Deal programs which both helped artists and also documented

the lives of ordinary Americans during those difficult times.

Paul Sample.  "Miners Resting."  1935.

The countryside is being ripped up by big industry and mining, although the men were

not benefitting.  The painting is organized into three parts, like a medieval religious triptych,

by the posts of the porch.  The men are simple, solid figu real and powerful as the hills

 in the distance

Charles Sheeler.  "Barn Reds."

Sheeler used simplified forms, crisp lines, and flat areas of color, all

modernist techniques, to show the barns of Pennsylvania.

Niles Spencer.  "The Dormer Window."  1927

Spencer purposes distorts perspective and simplifies forms of this

view in Provincetown, MA, to accentuate the image of outdoors,

which he brings much closer.

Harold Weston.  "The New Stove."  1926

Note the geometric forms, the flat areas of color, the strong outlines -

all modernist techniques for a simple interior.

Charles Sheeler.  "Staircase - Doylestown."

Sheeler was both a photographer and Precisionist painter.  The geometric forms,

the strong lines, the flat areas of color are all modernist techniques.

N. C. Wyeth.  "Capt. Brown - Port Clyde, Maine"  1935

Although N.C. Wyeth, Andrew's father, was most noted for his

book illustrations, he also painted scenes of rural America such as

this fisherman in Maine, where the Wyeths spent the summer.

Andrew Wyeth.  "Ridge Church."  1936

This was painted by a young Andrew Wyeth at his father's suggestion.

Andrew Wyeth.  "A Cut in the Road."  1940

The scene can still be photographed not far from the museum, although the building
in the center has been demolished.


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