Andrew Wyeth, whose landscapes of brown fields around his home in Chadds Ford and portraits of plain folk from Chester County and coastal Maine, where he summered, made him one of the 20th century’s best-known artists, is being honored by the U.S. Postal Service.
On July 12, the centenary of the artist’s birth, the postal service will celebrate the first day of 12 commemorative Forever stamps, each depicting a detail from a Wyeth painting. Wyeth died in 2009.
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Wyeth follows in his father’s footsteps. The postal service honored the famous illustrator N.C. Wyeth in 2001 with a 31-cent stamp showing his dramatic rendering of Billy Bones from Robert Lewis Stevenson’s adventure novel Treasure Island.
The July 12 ceremony will take place at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, where a retrospective exhibition covering Andrew Wyeth’s entire career is on view.
On hand at the 11 a.m. ceremony will be Wyeth’s son, painter Jamie Wyeth; Patrick Mendonca, senior director of the Office of the Postmaster General; and Virginia A. Logan, head of the Brandywine Conservancy.
Each stamp features a detail from a Wyeth painting: Wind from the Sea (1947), Big Room (1988), Christina’s World (1948), Alvaro and Christina (1968), Frostbitten (1962), Sailor’s Valentine (1985), Soaring (1942 — 1950), North Light (1984), Spring Fed (1967), The Carry (2003), Young Bull (1960), and My Studio (1974).
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