American Art and Pennsylvania Impressionists

This work will be included in the database of the artist's work being compiled by the Wyeth Center at the William A. Farnsworth Museum, Rockland, Maine.

Provenance:

James Graham & Sons, New York, New York.

Acquired directly from the above.

Private Collection, Pennsylvania.

Exhibited:

Rockland, The Wyeth Center at the Farnsworth Art Museum, "Gulls, Ravens and a Vulture: The Ornithological Paintings of James Wyeth," June 26 – October 10, 2005, p. 66, fig. 57, illustrated.

Lot Note:

Immensely indebted to the narrative art of his grandfather N. C. and the realist aesthetic of his father Andrew, Jamie Wyeth has nonetheless crafted a pictorial language wholly his own, one that renders the world around him not simply as it appears but reaches its primal core with an eerily disquieting effect.

For Raven Pair (1998), Wyeth was likely inspired by the January 1998 snowstorm that blanketed Maine, his long-time home state, bringing the area to a standstill. The work consists of two black birds occupying the lower half of the composition, as if slowly but confidently passing through, against a uniform icy white backdrop. The birds are portrayed half-length, showcasing their long, sharp beaks, intensely alert eyes, and scapular feathers, their wings rendered shoulder-like. The ravens look determined as they seem to march across the canvas, as if on a mysterious quest, unfazed by the bitter cold around them. As they are subtly anthropomorphized, unsettling elements seep through the apparent realism.

The haunting atmosphere of the scene is also conveyed by the stark contrast between the bright, abstract wintry conditions and the dark, detailed bodies of the birds. The work is shrouded in a sense of brooding and foreboding, an ominous feeling typically associated with the figure of the raven. The birds’ stance, at once avian-like and uncannily human, commands the composition, compelling the viewer into an all-absorbing interaction with nature, abolishing the familiar distance between the observed and the observer.