Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination

This illustrated talk will give a behind-the-scenes look at a new exhibition at the Brandywine Museum of Art that will be of particular interest to friends of the Haverford College Arboretum. Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination brings together a remarkable group of watercolors, most never before exhibited, that reflect the way this uniquely place-based American artist responded to individual specimens of southeastern Pennsylvania’s plant life. Not as a botanical illustrator but as an art historically literate visionary, Andrew Wyeth found in the ordinary plant life of Chadds Ford a point of departure for remarkable creations.

Dr. William L. Coleman ’07 is Wyeth Foundation Curator and Director of the Andrew & Betsy Wyeth Study Center at the Brandywine Museum of Art, with additional oversight of staff and collections at the Farnsworth Art Museum in Maine. After Haverford, where he is a member of the Corporation and an occasional alumni interviewer for Admissions, he earned two master’s degrees in the UK, a doctorate from Berkeley, and fellowships from the NEH and Smithsonian. He writes, teaches, and curates exhibitions centering on the landscape art of the United States.

Andrew Wyeth, Buttonwood, Study for The Hunter, 1943. Drybrush watercolor on paper, 19 ½ x 29 ½ in. Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, B0575R. © Wyeth Foundation for American Art/Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York, 2024

Parking can be found in our visitor parking lot and participants will meet for this presentation in VCAM 001.