North Carolina Museum of Art

Andrew Wyeth's meticulously imagined art conveys a tragic vision. Considered together, his paintings comprise a lifelong meditation upon the frailty of life and the imminence of death. The artist celebrates the bleak landscape of late autumn and winter, the weathered barns and farmhouses of Maine and Pennsylvania, and the people who endure a hardscrabble existence on the margins of society.

Winter 1946 is one of the artist's most autobiographical works, painted immediately after the death of his father, the celebrated illustrator N. C. Wyeth. According to the artist, the hill became a symbolic portrait of his father, and the figure of the boy, Allan Lynch, running aimlessly "was me, at a loss—that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping." Even without this story, the image is troubling: a dark, jagged form set awkwardly against an oceanic swell of brown. A skilled dramatist, Wyeth eliminates all distracting elements from the scene. The boy and his thoughts are visually isolated, his eyes averted. Further deepening the physical and emotional alienation of the boy, the artist has us look down upon the scene from an improbable height. The heightened clarity of the picture results from Wyeth's use of the egg tempera medium: ground earth and mineral colors mixed with yolk and thinned with water. Wyeth once admitted he likes tempera for its "feeling of dry lostness."