James Browning Wyeth
 Jamie Wyeth, a son of Andrew Wyeth grandson of NC Wyeth. Jamie was born in 1944. By the age of ten, he was taken out of school. After the morning spent with a tutor, he spent he afternoon in his father’s studio, dressing up in the same costumes his father used, making up games with his friends, and drawing inspiration from the same books and pictures of NC. Jamie’s sense of design was already visible in his childhood pen and ink drawings of knights and soldiers in combat. At the age of 12, he was studying with his aunt Carolyn, who painted abstract compositions. Later Jamie worked in Andrew’s studio. At the age of 19, Jamie had a one man show in New York City, and has in later years served on the National Council of the Arts. His talent has been duly noted by the art world as well as the political one.
Jamie’s work remains in the tradition of NC—he is loyal to realism, and has a strong sense of story behind the image. He says of his work; “All I really want to present to the public is my painting, unadorned with anecdotal explanations or pretty words.” Who I am and what I care about are expressed in my work.
Jamie did a portrait of JFK, which now hangs in the John F Kennedy Library in Dorchester, Massachusetts. Jamie chose an expression for the President’s face which he saw—the calculating gaze that masks the political mind forever diverted to some scene still unplayed.
Maine is the traditional summer home for the Wyeths and has been so since NC arrived at Port Clyde in 1916. Andrew settled in nearby Cushing and Jamie moved into artist Rockwell Kent’s old house on Monhegan Island in 1968. Jamie married his wife, Phyllis, in 1968. Jamie lives on his own Chadds Ford farm, Point Lookout—named for a rocky ridge of land that crosses an old Indian Trail and commands a sweeping view of the Brandywine River below. Jamie likes best the views of deep woods, close up. He has walked, ridden, canoed, and painted every inch of the Brandywine Valley, all very much in the Wyeth tradition—“truth to nature,” the tradition that connects the artists named Wyeth.
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