A Blue Hen study day at the Brandywine Museum

On a crisp but sunny Friday morning in early September 2024, nearly two dozen students and faculty from the Department of Art History gathered in the newly renovated courtyard of the Brandywine Museum of Art. They were there to visit the museum and take part in an in-depth tour of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center. The center, established in 2022, oversees the collection of Wyeth’s art owned by the Wyeth Foundation for American Art: more than 7,000 works from seven decades of creative activity, ranging from pencil sketches to finished oils. 

The Study Center’s new director and a Wyeth Foundation Curator, William L. Coleman, met the group in the courtyard and spoke about the museum, its collections, operations and audiences, as well as the larger Brandywine Conservancy that preserves the land and waters of the Brandywine watershed for locals and visitors alike. 

Coleman is eager to attract a diverse audience, from scholars to artists and the general public, and he was happy to have the art history group there. He aspires to engage audiences not just with Wyeth’s work, but also the range of issues Wyeth’s art touches on, including botany, environmental change, preservation, regional architecture, domestic culture and the enduring bonds both of family and friendship.

After hearing about highlights of the museum’s collections and ways that the Study Center can support undergraduate courses and graduate and faculty research, the group moved inside, where Coleman pulled out drawings from the dozens of lateral files lining the light-filled center and showed us Wyeth’s personal library. Small groups took turns visiting a storage vault for Coleman to slide out panels of paintings, tell their often-intricate stories and answer the many questions of a very curious crowd.

Toward the end of the morning, the group viewed “Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination,” an exhibition of Wyeth’s work that Coleman curated. It was a genuine revelation, with many spectacular watercolors and drawings that had never been publicly displayed before. Coleman generously led them through the show, piece by piece, emphasizing Wyeth’s intimate relationship with the unique ecosystem of the Brandywine watershed, evident in his revisiting individual plants to note how they were changing across the seasons and over the years. Many visitors left the show with a new understanding of what it means to have a powerful and lasting connection to a particular place.

It was a vital event for the department, and it strengthened UD’s affiliation with the Brandywine Museum, as Coleman’s dedication to object-oriented study parallels art history’s mission. It was restorative as well, summoning the air of fellowship and camaraderie that years of pandemic had diminished. Rambling from room to room that morning, faculty and students reinforced intellectual and personal bonds amongst themselves and inaugurated a promising relationship with an important regional resource.