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cushing maine

Thoreau and Wyeth: Born Under the Same Sign, 100 Years Apart

When Andrew Wyeth was born on July 12, 1917, exactly 100 years to the day after the birth of Henry David Thoreau, his father was delighted.

Wind From the Sea, courtesy National Gallery of Art

Henry David Thoreau was a favorite of the Wyeth family, which produced some of the best-known artists and artworks of the 20^th century. N.C. Wyeth, the Needham, Mass.-born patriarch, characterized himself as “unconventional, democratic, free and careless of formalities, contemptuous of restraint, and with a wayward enthusiasm.” Much like Thoreau.

N.C. Wyeth considered schools a menace, and hired tutors to educate his sons and daughters at home. He taught Andrew to love the writings of Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, Tolstoy and Henry David Thoreau.

Andrew Wyeth painted scenes close to home and close to nature. He endowed his landscapes and subjects with a haunting mysticism. In a 1961 interview, he said,

If what I’m trying to do has an value at all, it’s because I’ve managed to express the quality of the country which I live in … So what is important about my pictures, I feel, is a sort of organic thing of country … being able to express it symbolically.

Wyeth and Thoreau

Andrew Wyeth split his life between Chadd’s Ford, Pa., and Cushing, Maine, just as Thoreau only rarely strayed from Concord, Mass. He never got drawn into city life. He painted very much according to Thoreau’s Transcendental belief that people understand the world around them through intuition and imagination.

N.C. Wyeth once wrote about an open window in a way that echoed Thoreau’s observations about nature. It also foretold one of his son’s most famous paintings:

To all outward appearances, an extremely modest and commonplace vista, confined as it is by the four sides of the window frame and cut into eight exact panels by the window sashes, it is a scene that might be almost anywhere on earth. It is stripped of any glamour whatsoever, not a detail is outstanding or sensational; in fact, it is a glomeraton steeped in utter commonplaceness and seems doomed to eternal oblivion … but a resurgent gust of wind sweeps across the tiny area! The lilac leaves shudder and fold themselves back into broken heart shapes of new-wet luster, then frantically restoring themselves into position to be swept again and again into bright-varnished and twisted shapes. The tawny patch of long grass bends and leans into agitated motion, and the gray thin limbs of the spruce trees sway up and down in a ghostly slow dance. The deep gloom of the forest beyond remains still, like darkness.

Just His Imagination

My imagination is suddenly whipped into an almost exalted appreciation of the magnificence of the little isolated and unrelated scene before me, and I am astounded at its vast beauty and its sublime importance, and am made to realize, in one poignant spasm, that before my eyes exists the profoundest beauty, the greatest glamour and magnificence possible for human sight and spiritual pleasure.

Read what he wrote in his journal on his 40th birthday.

With thanks to The Art of Andrew Wyeth, by Wanda M. Corn. This story updated in 2022.

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Peleg Wadsworth Escapes the British in Castine, Maine

The escape of Peleg Wadsworth from Fort George in Castine, Maine, was not something Col. John Campbell was anxious to report to his commander.

On June 22, 1781, Campbell wrote a letter to Sir Henry Clinton, starting off with his plans to leave for Halifax, the fortification of Fort George and details about the disposition of British troops at the fort.

Silhouette of Peleg Wadsworth

At the end of the letter Campbell finally broke the bad news.

I am sorry to inform your Excellency that on the 19th instant, the Rebel Brigadier General Wadsworth who was confined here in a Barrack Room, With one Burton once a Major of Militia, made their escape, by cutting a Hole in the ceiling of the Room, altho two Sentrys were constantly Posted at the Door of the Room and a Window but in the Door for the Sentrys to look through to observe their Motions.

Peleg Wadsworth

Peleg Wadsworth, the grandfather of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, served as a brigadier general in the patriot forces. As such, he had a discouraging task. He commanded troops raised for the defense of the Province of Maine, then part of Massachusetts. He didn’t have nearly enough men, and the colonists along the sparsely settled frontier switched loyalties between the British and the Americans.

The British had almost completed an earthworks fort in Castine that could accommodate 350 soldiers. They wanted to establish a colony in Downeast Maine they called New Ireland

The British at Fort George had already turned back an attack in 1779, known as the Penobscot Expedition. It resulted in the destruction of 43 American ships – the worst U.S. naval disaster until Pearl Harbor.

Nighttime Raid

In early 1781, the 32-year-old Wadsworth headquartered in a small frame house in Thomaston, Maine. With him he had three bodyguards, his wife, his two children and a friend of the family, a Miss Fenno.

On the night of Feb. 17, one sentry stood guard over the sleeping family and four other soldiers were stationed in the kitchen. Then suddenly a British raiding party of 25 men stormed into the house.

They quickly overpowered the sentry and the guards. Wadsworth’s wife, Elizabeth ran to their two children, who the British did not harm. Wadsworth barricaded his bedroom door and shot at the British from his window with pistols, blunderbuss and musket.

Only when a raider shot him in the arm did he surrender.

Henry Clinton

Peleg Wadsworth was taken to Fort George, where he was treated as an officer and a gentleman. Though he was confined to a room, he ate in the officers’ mess and was allowed books and writing paper. His wound was tended to and his wife was allowed to visit.

Eventually, Wadsworth got a roommate: Maj. Benjamin Burton of Cushing, Maine, captured by a privateer off Monhegan Island. Burton and Wadsworth began to fear their captors would ship them to England, where they’d probably be tried for treason and hanged. They decided to escape.

They bought a gimlet from a servant, and Burton began to drill tiny holes in a circle in the ceiling. Wadsworth acted as lookout, as the door to their barracks room grate through which their sentries could watch them.

They made a paste of breadcrumbs to fill the holes and hide their handiwork. They feared detection when butter in the bread discolored the wood.

After three weeks of drilling holes they readied for their escape.

‘No More To Do With The Military’

On a stormy night in June, the two prisoners punched through the ceiling and crawled out along the joists. They lowered themselves over the earthworks using blankets and met on the banks of the Penobscot River. Then they found a canoe and paddled across the river, evading a search party. For three days they hid in the woods, finally reaching safety in Warren, Maine.

Wadsworth went home to Plymouth, Mass., and, as he wrote in a letter, “I had no more to do with the Military. “

In 1784, he returned to Maine and bought property in what is now Portland. He built the first brick house in the city, now known as the Wadsworth-Longfellow House. Listed on the National Register of Historic Places, the Maine Historical Society runs it as a museum.

The National Register of Historic Places now lists Fort George.

With thanks to Maine Memory and Hidden History of Midcoast Maine by Patricia M. Higgins. This story last updated in 2022.

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Andrew Wyeth’s First Date With Christina Olson and Her World

Andrew Wyeth met his future wife and Christina Olson, the subject of his most famous painting, on the same day – his 22^nd birthday.

Christina’s World, by Andrew Wyeth

Christina Olson was born on May 3, 1893 and as a child contracted a disease that curbed her mobility — probably Charcot-Marie-Tooth Disease. Her world was then limited to her farm on Hathorne’s Point in Cushing, Maine, where she lived with her brother Alvaro. The house had been in their family for generations, since Capt. Samuel Hathorne II built it in the late 18^th century.

Wyeth spent summers at his own family’s summer home in Cushing.

Christina Olson

In The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Brian O’Doherty described his visit to the Olsons at their farm.

“…the first thing that one notices about Christina is her voice,” he wrote. “It is firmly lucid, a practical countrywoman’s voice, and it immediately wipes out her myth, the romantic half-pitiable aura of a spirit strait-jacketed into immobility. Her voice is immediate, without self-pity, and she follows what she has to say with a shrewd slow look from her brown eyes. She has a force of character that would make any condescension to her paralysis an insult.”

“She rules like a queen,” Wyeth once said.

Wyeth met the Olsons on a date with Betsy James – July 12, 1939. He went to Betsy’s house, and she then drove him to the Olson farm. Betsy vaguely remembered the reason: She’d just learned to drive and wanted to go somewhere. She and Andrew married the next year.

Years after meeting Christina Olson, Wyeth later said, she didn’t make much of an impression on him. The farmhouse did. The Olsons let him set up a studio in a room on the second floor. Looking out the window one day in 1948, Wyeth saw Christina Olson crawling in the field and got the inspiration for Christina’s World.

He worked on the background for two months, while closely sketching Christina’s hair, body and hands. Betsy posed for the figure. “I worked on the hill for months, that brown grass, and kept thinking about her in her pink dress like a faded lobster shell I might find on the beach, crumpled,” he said.

When it came time to lay in the figure, he put a pink tone on her shoulder – “and it almost blew me across the room.”

Flat Tire — Not

Wyeth then hung the painting in his house in Maine and no one reacted to it. “I thought, Boy, is this one ever a flat tire,” he said.

He was wrong. From then on he started receiving letters about Christina’s World — about one a week.

He had painted Christina Olson many times on her farm. Christina’s World, she said, was her favorite.

Alvaro Olson died on Christmas Eve in 1967, and Christina Olson died a month later. They were buried on their property in their family cemetery. Andrew Wyeth died on Jan. 16, 2009. He, too, was buried in the Olson family cemetery.

Andrew Wyeth receiving the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2007.

The farmhouse, a National Historic Landmark, is now owned by the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine. Christina’s World hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City.

This story about Christina Olson was updated in 2022. The image of Christina’s World By http://www.moma.org/collection/object.php?object_id=78455, Fair use, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?curid=8005786.

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