Andrew Wyeth’s Last Painting, Fleetingly Displayed: His Elegaic "Goodbye"

Instead showing you this notation from the book of remembrance stationed just outside of the Andrew Wyeth gallery at the Brandywine River Museum, Chadds Ford, PA, I wish I could have shown you an image of the artist's last painting, "Goodbye," which astonished me when I made my pilgrimage almost two weeks ago to the gallery-turned-shrine in Wyeth's hometown:


For one weekend, Jan. 31-Feb. 1, the Museum of Modern Art's iconic "Christina's World" was on view at the Brandywine, as part of its Wyeth tribute.

But the luminous, ethereal "Goodbye's" nine-day display at the entrance to the gallery slipped under the artworld radar. I had no idea, when I arrived, that I would be fortunate enough stand transfixed before this virtually unknown work, which has been unseen by the public, save for this fleeting exposure.

I was deeply moved by the painting and awed by the painter.

"Goodbye," executed last summer, is set on the shore of a private island off the Maine coast, where Wyeth owned two islands. The mottled white sky is vaguely ominous; the loosely painted water is breeze-rippled. In the upper right, atop a small hill, sits a simple, stark white house, described to me by a representative from the Andrew Wyeth Office as a "sail loft, where sails would have been stored."

But what moves some viewers to tears is what you see in the far left, just barely within the confines of the canvas---a sailboat leaning in the wind, with a tiny ghost of a figure facing the viewer, about to slip out of the picture. What's most haunting is how the house and the vessel dematerialize in the shimmering water.

No photography was allowed in the gallery. I tried to get permission to reproduce Wyeth's final masterpiece, but the artist's widow, Betsy, declined through a representative. I lack the status of distinguished American art scholar John Wilmerding, a friend of the Wyeth family, who was recently permitted to reproduce another powerfully elegaic, little known painting, "Snow Hill" (which is what I had come to Chadds Ford to see). The image of that 1989 work accompanied Wilmerding's Jan. 26 tribute to the late artist in the Wall Street Journal. (My own CultureGrrl tribute is here.)

"Snow Hill," also on view when I was at the Brandywine, is a clever in-joke for Wyeth aficionados, but didn't come close to matching the mesmerizing effect of "Goodbye." That painting was taken off view the day after I saw it, and was returned to Wyeth's widow Betsy, who, at this writing, has no plans for future display. It will eventually provide a brilliant coda to the catalogue raisonné that she is overseeing.

When I asked how its title was arrived at, Karen Baumgartner, the permissions and database coordinator for the Andrew Wyeth Office in Chadds Ford, replied somewhat cryptically:

The artist's wife Betsy is usually the one to title the works. Mr. Wyeth of course had some input as well, though I think it's fair to say that his passing was a big factor in settling on "Goodbye."

If Betsy has the last word on titles, it's possible that the painting's name may be revised. In the museum visitors' book of remembrance is Betsy Wyeth's own signed notation (which is what you see in the top photo):

Thank you, thank you, thank you. I'm only sorry Andy of course never saw "Goodbye, My Love" hanging.