Andrew, Jamie and Victoria Wyeth: A Favorite Local Family

Fee:	$49.00

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Creutzburg Center

260 Gulph Creek Road
Radnor, PA 19087
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Richard Rossello

Avery Galleries is a relative newcomer to the gallery world having been founded in 2001. The principal, Richard Rossello spent the first part of his career in an entirely different entrepreneurial business pursuit. What motivated him to form Avery Galleries was an enduring passion for American fine art. Rossello was a lifelong collector and avidly pursued collecting opportunities as an avocation. Lightning struck on his forty-eighth birthday when he suffered a mild heart attack. While recovering from the resultant bypass surgery, he decided that life was too short to do anything by half measure. He retired from his restaurant operating company and opened Avery Galleries. The gallery was founded on two guiding principles and they have become bedrock beliefs of the company. First, was to manage the quality of the art sold by purchasing it outright rather than taking art on consignment. This “put your money where your mouth is” orientation has allowed Avery to focus on works deemed to be most desirable, not on serving the needs of consignors who may or may not be selling works that meet the highest standards. Second, Rossello only buys paintings that he would want to own personally. These tenets have helped Avery Galleries to establish a reputation for consistent quality in the works of art offered. Furthermore, although at Avery Galleries, we have primarily focused on offering extraordinary works of art from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, in recent years, we have come to appreciate the strong bond between historic and contemporary art. It has become a new mission for the gallery to illuminate the relationships that exist between generations of artists, and we hope to break down the imaginary barriers that so many collectors and curators have erected. To that end, Avery has selectively begun showing the work of contemporary artists who, we believe, are making important contributions to the unfolding history of American art. Restoration and Framing When we buy paintings we believe we assume a curatorial responsibility. Each work of art we acquire is restored in a responsible manner. Specifically, we ensure that the surface is stable and old varnish and dirt are removed. We believe it is important that a restorer use the least intrusive methods and that any restoration is fully reversible. When clients acquire a painting from us, they are fully apprised of the work that has been performed. The way a painting is framed can be an important factor in the way artwork is perceived. Paintings from different periods require different styles of frames and different painting palettes require different frame colors or tones. In most cases, we think that paintings should be framed the way the artist would have wanted to see his or her painting framed at the time it was executed. Many artists were extremely particular in making these choices, some going so far as designing specific frames for their work. In each case, we purchase antique, “period” frames that were created at a time that would be appropriate for that painting. Once we have decided on the right period and style for the frame, we assess the color tones that will best complement the artwork. Finding just the right frame can take days or weeks and is becoming more and more expensive as authentic period frames become ever scarcer. Nevertheless, the resulting “marriages” of painting to frame are essential to fully revealing the qualities of each work of art.

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Victoria Wyeth

A 2008 Associated Press feature on Victoria Wyeth, who was 29 at the time, was published in numerous newspapers, including The Washington Post and The Providence Journal. She has also been profiled in The Wall Street Journal, Los Angeles Times, USA Today, and Vogue. Victoria Browning Wyeth, the only grandchild of iconic artist Andrew Wyeth, is the daughter of Nicholas and Jane Wyeth. Her father is a private art dealer, and her mother is an art advisor who was trained as an art historian. Ms. Wyeth is the great-granddaughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the niece of contemporary realist Jamie Wyeth. The summer after Ms. Wyeth’s sophomore year in high school, she began working at the Farnsworth Art Museum, near her family’s summer home in Maine. She was the Museum’s first-ever docent for their Andrew Wyeth Collection, the primary attraction for the majority of the Museum’s summer visitors. Before starting her first summer job, the young docent interviewed her grandfather at length about each of his works on view. When she couldn’t answer someone’s question during her tour, she’d visit the artist when she returned home to hear the correct answer. Unlike other speakers on the work of Andrew and Jamie Wyeth, Ms. Wyeth’s years of conversations with the artists about their work give her talks a unique perspective. Since her first gallery talk in June, 1995, Ms. Wyeth has interspersed discussions of subject matter and technique with direct quotes to her from her grandfather and her uncle. She also, of course, adds many personal memories and family stories. A 1997 graduate of the Nightingale-Bamford School in New York, Ms. Wyeth earned a B.A. in American Cultural Studies in 2001 from Bates College in Lewiston, Maine. She then spent a year as a Visiting Graduate Student at Harvard University, where she studied the History of Science and the History of Medicine. She further pursued her academic studies by attending Wesleyan University in Middletown, CT., earning a Master of Arts degree in the History of Clinical Psychiatry. Her M.A. thesis was titled: Delusions of Body and Soul: Chronicling Delusions at the Connecticut Hospital for the Insane, 1867-1886. During Ms. Wyeth’s senior year of college, she organized and curated her first museum exhibition, which was held at the Bates College Museum of Art. Andrew Wyeth: Her Room was an in-depth study of her grandfather’s process in creating a tempera painting. Her Room, painted in 1963, was lent by the Farnsworth Art Museum. From their personal collection, her grandparents lent all the preparatory studies. From the artist’s initial drawings for Her Room to his final detailed watercolors, no exhibition of this kind had ever before been held. The catalogue’s introductory essays were written by Thomas Hoving, former director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and by author Richard Meryman. From 2004 until 2011, Ms. Wyeth conducted gallery talks five days a week at the Brandywine River Museum, in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, near her grandparents’ home. The Brandywine Museum is renowned for its collection of works by the Wyeth family. At one of her gallery talks in Chadds Ford, she met the Medical Director of the Norristown (PA.) State Hospital, resulting in her offer of a part-time job there, which she started in early 2008. She began as a Research Assistant to a forensic psychiatrist, eventually becoming a therapist until she left in April, 2017 for medical reasons. Ms. Wyeth has lectured extensively throughout the United States and abroad. She’s given gallery talks and Power Point lectures at Wyeth museum exhibitions from Tokyo to Paris. Her early morning gallery talks during the 2006 Andrew Wyeth retrospective at the Philadelphia Museum were consistently sold-out. Standing room only is the norm at Ms. Wyeth’s PowerPoint lectures. In addition to lecturing at museums, she’s lectured on her grandfather’s work at Bonhams Auction House in New York, at the Palm Beach Art Fair, at annual conferences of doctors and travel agents, and to college alumni groups. She’s given innumerable talks across the country to Private Wealth Management clients. In October, 2017, Ms. Wyeth was the guest speaker in Rockland, Maine, for the annual Judicial Conference for the First Circuit Court of Appeals. She was thrilled that two of the audience members were Supreme Court Chief Justice John G. Roberts, Jr. and Justice Stephen Breyer. Ms. Wyeth has devoted much of her time to giving pro bono lectures. She’s spoken to students of all ages, and in 2015, Ms. Wyeth delivered a TEDx talk to more than 1,600 junior high school students in Pennsylvania. She’s also spoken at prisons and nursing homes. For her 10th college reunion in June, 2011, Ms. Wyeth curated Andrew and Jamie Wyeth: Selections from the Private Collection of Victoria Browning Wyeth for the Bates College Museum of Art. Ms. Wyeth is a gifted photographer; the Philadelphia Museum of Art used her photographs of her grandfather for publicity purposes for their 2006 retrospective Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic. Moreover, her black and white photographs of the artist were exhibited in conjunction with his exhibitions at the Bates College Museum of Art (2000-2001), the Mississippi Museum of Art (2001), and the High Museum of Art (2005-2006). Two museum shows including Ms. Wyeth's photographs were held in 2017. The first solo museum exhibition of her photographs, Victoria Wyeth: My Andy, was at the Greenville County Museum of Art in Greenville, South Carolina, which has the world’s largest public collection of watercolors by her grandfather. Her other show in 2017 was at the Fenimore Art Museum in Cooperstown, New York, where she was guest curator of Andrew Wyeth at 100: A Family Remembrance, organized to celebrate Wyeth’s 100th birthday that July. The exhibition consisted primarily of loans from Ms. Wyeth’s personal collection and included sketches, paintings, her grandfather’s paint brushes, two of his painting smocks, illustrated letters the artist had written to his granddaughter, and his denim jacket with the American flag on the back which she is wearing in his 1999 portrait of her. Also included in the show were 19 photographs of Andrew Wyeth that his granddaughter had taken of him since she was in 7th grade. In the introduction to the Fenimore catalogue, Ms. Wyeth wrote, “I feel it’s time the world saw the Andy in Andrew Wyeth….My hope is that people who love his work will now fall in love with him as a person – a husband, a father, and, of course, a grandfather.” In the summer of 2018, Ms. Wyeth began working as a Research Assistant at the Aaron T. Beck Psychopathology Research Center in the Department of Psychiatry at the University of Pennsylvania. (Dr. Beck is the founder of Cognitive Behavior Therapy.) The first gallery exhibition of Ms. Wyeth’s photographs was held in the fall of 2018 in Philadelphia’s Stanek Gallery. Although she is the first Wyeth to use a camera, her grandfather never disparaged her photos but rather gave her hints about how to improve the composition. His “eye” is evident in many of her photographs. N.C. Wyeth’s legacy now continues with the 4th generation.

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Date	Day	Time	Location
12/03/2021	Friday	12:30 PM to 2:30 PM	Creutzburg Center