#ArtDept: “Pumpkinhead – Self-Portrait” by Jamie Wyeth

Pumpkinhead – Self-Portrait (1972)- Jamie Wyeth

James Browning Wyeth (born 1946) is a contemporary American realist painter, a third-generation American artist: son of Andrew Wyeth, one of America’s most popular painters, and the grandson of Newell Convers Wyeth, famous for his distinctive, illuminating illustrations for special editions of classic novels.

Jamie Wyeth:

“Everybody in my family paints – excluding possibly the dogs.”

In fact, non-human subjects are a common theme in his work. He paints livestock and other animals with the same care and intensity he devotes to portraits of people. He won precocious fame with Portrait Of Pig (1970), his gorgeous picture of a pink and white sow.

His first one-man show was in NYC when he was only 20-years-old, and there was a career retrospective of his work shortly before his 30th birthday.

Since the 1970s, Wyeth usually paints on corrugated cardboard. He says that he likes the rough striated effect it gives to his paintings. He even recreates that feel on his works on canvas.

In the 1960s Wyeth purchased a property on Monhegan Island, Maine, which had previously been owned by Rockwell Kent, the famed American painter of modernist wilderness landscapes admired by his grandfather. He also has a home in his native Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In the 1990s, his parents sold him the Tenants Harbor Lighthouse on Southern Island in Maine that they had owned since 1978. He has written that the lighthouse tower provides him with a studio with the solitude he enjoys for his work.

The Wyeths: Three Generations, a huge exhibition is currently on view at the Portland Art Museum through January 2018. And, Andrew Wyeth: In Retrospect is currently at the Seattle Art Museum. Jamie Wyeth’s work can also be found at The White House, The National Gallery Of Art, National Portrait Gallery, Fine Arts Museum Of San Francisco, and the Museum Of Fine Arts, Boston.

Pumpkinhead – Self-Portrait sold for $1.7 million at Sotheby’s in 2015 to an anonymous buyer. He lives at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford.