The Brandywine River Museum has acquired Angus (1974), one of Jamie Wyeth's most famous paintings. Angus is currently on view at the museum in the Bayard and Mary Sharp Gallery.
Jamie Wyeth (b. 1946) is renowned for his paintings of animals and animal portraits. He goes beyond the broad characteristics of the animals to capture individual differences, finding aspects not unlike those of people. Wyeth discovered the cattle featured in Angus in Pennsylvania Dutch country and purchased them because he knew he wanted to paint them.
Angus depicts a herd of black Angus cattle staring menacingly from the canvas. In an interview about the painting, Wyeth said "They were wonderful models once I figured out a system for keeping their attention. My farmer feeds them out of a truck, and I would go out into the field with my easel and set it up inside the truck. All the cattle would come around and look right up at me; every half hour I kicked out a bale of hay to keep them there.
"They all had numbers around the necks and #78 was nuts she'd go right after you and was much more dangerous than a bull. One day, I was drawing in the field, totally lost in thought, and I all of a sudden felt this hot breath on the back of my neck. I turned my head around slowly and all I could see was #78's tag. I flew over the fence andthe painting was finished."
Angus has appeared in numerous exhibitions, most recently in Factory Work: Warhol, Wyeth and Basquiat. Organized by and first on view at the Brandywine River Museum in 2006, Factory Work traveled to the Marion Koogler McNay Art Museum in San Antonio, Texas, and the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, from May 6 to August 26, 2007. Angus was also among the paintings in An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art, which traveled to the then-Soviet Union in 1987 as part of a major exhibition in Leningrad and Moscow of 117 works by Wyeth, his father Andrew Wyeth and his grandfather N.C. Wyeth. The show also traveled to nine other cities around the world. Monies for the purchase came from the Frolic Fund, created in honor of George A. "Frolic" Weymouth, an artist and Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Brandywine Conservancy, the environmental and cultural organization that he helped found in 1967. -- www.brandywinemuseum.org
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