Chris Crosman – Phyllis Mills Wyeth (1940–2019): Portraits and Homages by Jamie Wyeth

Phyllis Wyeth and Jamie Wyeth had been married for over fifty years when Phyllis died in 2019. During the preceding half century and more Wyeth painted her portrait continuously. But, she is also present in many indirect portraits—homages, really, to his partner, model, and ever-present muse. An artist who has stated, “everything I paint is a portrait,” may be viewed by some as out of step with the late 20th and early 21st centuries and their plethora of “-isms” (our current everywhere, everything, all-at-once art world of postmodern eclecticism). Wyeth’s direct antecedents—along with his own father Andrew and grandfather N.C. Wyeth—include the twin pillars of American portraiture, Thomas Eakins and John Singer Sargent. Sargent’s small, early painting of a rooftop in Capri—in the tenderness of the brushstrokes as well as the charged, mesmerizing image of Rosina Ferrara dancing the Tarantella in the waning light—informs many of Wyeth’s paintings of Phyllis, if only subliminally as kindred romantic souls.

Wyeth’s portraits of Phyllis take on many forms, guises, moods, settings, and varied painterly techniques and materials. They were married in the fraught year of 1968—assassinations, urban and campus riots, the draft, and Vietnam imploding. A few years earlier, while working with the Kennedy family in Washington, D.C., Phyllis had been badly injured in an automobile accident. Never fully recovered, she would lose use of her legs over the decades, enduring nearly constant physical discomfort and pain. His numerous portraits through the ensuing decades of their marriage, however, rarely refer directly to his wife’s disability. His very first portrait of Phyllis slipping underneath falling leaves suggests, perhaps, the possibility of nature’s capacity for healing. And for Phyllis, whether tending the rolling landscapes of her Brandywine River Valley farmstead, or looking out to sea from her Maine island homes, nature was always with her—embedded within her very being as many of her husband’s paintings metaphorically suggest.

Wyeth’s paintings of Phyllis are also and fundamentally about paint, the power of paint, a viscous, flowing, unruly medium allowing people, animals, and places to be seen at a deeper level of consciousness and caring. Thus, Jamie’s portraits are about a particular, unique, well-lived life, a life as active, elusive, emotionally rich, complicated, and as creative as his own. It would not be wrong to say the paintings of and for Phyllis are also self-portraits. More broadly, his subject matter is, in part, the nexus of chance and transformative change. Brilliant, often high-keyed colors and loving contexts for Phyllis include thin, fragile irises reaching toward an azure sky against the whitewashed tower of their lightkeeper’s home on Southern Island—their own private Isle of Capri where nature dances like Sargent’s Rosina.

One of Wyeth’s last major portraits of his wife is titled Spring, the Hanging of Tree Rocks, completed in 2017. Notably, Phyllis is uncontained by the painted inner frames—a translucent, ghostly outer frame surrounds a thin black inner frame or liner—a frame within a frame within a frame, lest anyone is confused as to whether or not this is a painting. With the passing years and Phyllis’s death in 2019, the outer “ghost” frame adds another layer of poignancy. The subject—weighting tree branches with rocks—alludes to her familial heritage and personal interest in horticultural science and artistry. Phyllis’s upbringing and ancestry includes storied du Pont family estates now open to the public: Longwood Gardens and Winterthur in the Brandywine River Valley of Pennsylvania and Delaware.

In her husband’s writhing, semi-abstract scene, she wears a blood-red winter coat and fur-trimmed hat, as if to contradict an early spring emerging with its rioting pink blossoms. The other four figures and disembodied faces, as well as Phyllis in the foreground, can be seen as collectively representing the five senses—sight, smell, taste, hearing, and touch—although their communal presence simultaneously conjures folk tale fairies and, perhaps, Druidic rites of spring. Phyllis, in three-quarter length profile and seated on a plain wooden chair, turns sideways reaching toward one of the hanging rocks—the sense of touch, so important to creative expression for both Phyllis and Jamie.

The colors, forms, and lively textures of the painting, even without Phyllis, can be viewed as her portrait—her aging body weighted and distorted by time and disability, but still only partially framed by or captive to natural processes. The painting and its painted frames suggest, too, that human attempts to control nature are at best an illusion. From his first portrait of Phyllis, covered by leaves, to this late homage to his wife’s enduring passion for nature, Phyllis remained Jamie’s elusive, courageous, ill-fated companion—weather, seasonal change, and life notwithstanding.

Again, Wyeth’s subject matter in nearly all of his paintings, whether Phyllis, or feral cats, wilding Monhegan children, thieving ravens, and sinful seagulls, is the transformative power of paint, its viscous, colored nothingness somehow transformable into realms of the spirit and imagination.

His portrait of Phyllis Catching Pollen is a reprise of an earlier, more commonly experienced theme of child-like wonder: a painting of Phyllis Catching Snowflakes. In both, Wyeth captures a joyous moment where Phyllis stretches upwards on her “sticks” to ingest nature itself, here in the form of green tree-pollen from a Jackson Pollock-like all-over scrim of dripping, pooling, puddling, wriggling abstraction. The poured, painterly dancing yellow-green of early spring trees, as much a portrait of Phyllis as her full-length image. Cue Carole King’s “(You Make Me Feel Like) A Natural Woman.”

Whatever else Wyeth might be telling us in his paintings of Phyllis, sitting for formal, traditional portraits was not anything she seems to have had much time for. Hence, numerous images of Phyllis in motion. She was, as his many portraits attest, always on the move. Phyllis drives antique carriages in Connemara and And Then into the Deep Gorge. Passing before us, she steers the powerful animals through dark and rough terrain. In Connemara, her rose-pink jacket and wide-brimmed, floral-adorned hat and off-center body seen from behind, exert firm control with a light touch on the thinnest of taut reins. Body language is fearless and supremely confident. There can be little doubt her iron will and long-practiced driving skills will prevail. Even Phyllis’s small dog, Dozer, appears at ease, if deeply interested in the horse’s swishing tail and massive hindquarters.

In Stealing Holly Phyllis makes her getaway on her electric scooter. Her loyal accomplice, another small but ever-present Jack Russell Terrier, watches from his perch beneath her feet. The circle around Iggy’s left eye has been added in real life by Wyeth, a wry allusion to Pete the Pup of “Our Gang” (“Little Rascals”) comedies of the 1930s and 1940s. Mischief and warmly worn humor was always present in their relationship and in her husband’s art. In other paintings, Iggy—named after “the Godfather of Punk,” Iggy Pop—is curled next to or beside Phyllis in small greeting cards, intimate visual “notes” to their many friends and extended family.

Wyeth often works from a kind of conceptual-montage aesthetic. He notes, “But so much is done in your mind. I paint more in my bed and in dreams than I do actually sitting at an easel.” Disparate images, some from dreams, others from fragments of memory or even art and literary history, land in paintings, often unexpectedly. A whale’s jawbone hovers beside a modern-day Ishmael or Jonah, naked and alone in a portrait of Monhegan Island teenager, Orca Bates. The same jawbone is above his earlier portrait of Phyllis sitting casually on a comfortable, modern couch. She is wearing an old-fashioned, high-collared white dress and sits with arms casually folded, looking ahead and perhaps already engaged in conversation with someone in our, the viewer’s, space.

In the later (1990) painting of Orca, the teenager sits dripping wet, looking beyond the framing edge. Sitting on an antique seaman’s chest, he is abruptly transported into the present by the small detail of a black-banded wristwatch. If Orca is Jonah and Phyllis is Ishmael they both remember and are borrowed from a vast array of visual sources—Wyeth’s (unlikely to some) friendship with Andy Warhol, fright wigs, and male and female denizens of Warhol’s Factory where Wyeth worked for several months; Wyeth’s fascination with the lithe figure of Rudolf Nureyev, the spectacle of dance, and a theatrical world of artificial lighting; Botticelli and countless museum portraits and masterpieces; the sons and daughters of local farmers and fishermen, to name only a few. They are all Orca and Phyllis, too.

Nevertheless, comfortable repose meets Melville’s literary leviathan. And beyond imagination and metaphor and at some level of consciousness, Phyllis and Orca become each other. They are both seated alone in unfamiliar, time-shifted worlds—shared worlds of island isolation and quiet cultural displacement. To be clear, Wyeth’s portraits of his wife and those of Orca Bates are also individualized and carefully rendered to reveal the precise look and separate stories of each. No one mistakes Phyllis for Orca, whose gangly, adolescent giraffe-like legs and demeanor could not be more different or uniquely his own. Still, Phyllis and Orca begin to merge into one another along with so much more, as noted above. Wyeth knows his subjects from inside to outward demeanor, an additive, mental collage-like process. Individuals, even portrait subjects, are ageless, gender-free actors on the same theater-prop filled stages, and they play each other’s parts—naked and clothed, natural and domestic, adolescent anxiety and withdrawn adult weariness.

It is unclear whether Orca’s pointed fur hat in The Mainland is purloined, possibly like the multi-colored lobster buoys once belonging to different Maine lobster fishermen that he drags along the ice-covered shoreline. Or is the hat simply borrowed from Phyllis by her husband, linking the two, unbeknownst to either? Phyllis sits aboard an elegant, antique sleigh with its complex, curving filigree construction. Regal in her sable coat, she is an Anna Karenina-like figure wearing the novel’s tensions between urban and rural life, motion and stillness, escape and confinement. So, too, does Orca from the polar-opposite context of a working-class fishing community. Wyeth occasionally quotes himself, but repeating the unusual fur-trimmed hat in his painting of Orca is another example of how places, clothes, even genders become interchangeable—and just irresistibly, mysteriously strange. Phyllis can be Orca while Orca can be Phyllis—at least in art and cross-dressing.

Androgyny inhabits many of Wyeth’s figures. Antique uniforms and ancient artifacts like lighthouses are recurring motifs, often accompanied by figures of uncertain historical vintage and whose identities—sexual and otherwise—are never fully disclosed. Many of Wyeth’s paintings harken, as well, to N.C. Wyeth’s illustrations for classic adventure stories, beloved of young readers of Wyeth’s generation before TV and the internet devoured attention spans. Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Black Arrow are among dozens of books illustrated by his grandfather that the youngest Wyeth references in his own paintings. Is that Phyllis, wearing a royal British Horse Guard’s uniform with her back to us, hair flying like the racing clouds passing above? If Betsy Wyeth with her back to us, posed for her husband’s iconic Christina’s World, then Phyllis/Orca is her upright aristocratic/country girl (or boy) alter-ego. S/he stands, stalwart, out of time and place, looking toward the Wyeth’s new home on Southern Island (purchased from Betsy and Andrew) at the entrance to Tenant’s Harbor. Whether playful homage to his father’s iconic painting or not, Jamie’s composition centers on an anonymous visitor, blown ashore and announcing her/his sudden presence through brilliant color and flashing, vigorous brushwork. No, this is far from his father’s and Christina’s world but, rather, a startling, painterly dreamscape transformed and colored by history, romance, postmodern fantasy, and an entirely invented passage beginning in realism and proceeding to, well, something else entirely.

Southern Light depicts Phyllis standing in the star-framed wooden doorway to the restored, 19th-century fog-warning bell tower on Southern Island. Her shortened hair and slim physique echo Orca’s, but this is among Wyeth’s most formal and direct portraits of his wife. She appears to be waiting, watching, her attention attracted to something approaching from just beyond the framing edge. For what or for whom is unknown. Wyeth presents her as a modern-day Emma, Lady Hamilton, wearing a simple but elegantly understated dark dress, waiting expectantly for an absent Admiral Lord Nelson. Killed at Trafalgar, he will never come. Or, more in keeping with Phyllis’s own pragmatic, “don’t be silly” nature, she is waiting for Jamie to fetch their late-afternoon dinner guests from the mainland. Even in the quirks and quiddities of everyday life that the isolation of island living brings, Jamie’s portrait conveys something of Phyllis’ stalwart, steady presence, her patience at living betwixt and between: island and mainland; neither inside nor outside; not only now but fixed in fascinating mystery and allure. Wyeth says the painting was inspired by Phyllis’s rapid recovery from serious, life-threatening back surgery from which she emerged with remarkably renewed vigor and a sense of physical renewal. She waits in the late afternoon light, bright of countenance but also shadowed, the momentary presence of star-crossed natural beauty.

Wyeth’s most recent works painted after Phyllis passed in 2019 are invariably restless, unsettled—silent screams muffled, at times, by nervous, mad laughter. Phyllis is no longer present as paint drips, oozes, slips. Color clashes, figures become larger than life while others dissolve into backgrounds, sometimes re-emerging as something else—slashing gestures for their own sake. Actual doors open and close. A giant, six-foot seagull greets us through a screen door, at once hilarious and terrifying.

Perhaps the truest, most publicly accessible and personally revealing “portrait” of Phyllis is permanently seeded in the landscape design for the open spaces between the main Farnsworth Museum buildings and the former church building housing galleries dedicated to exhibiting the work of Jamie Wyeth and his grandfather, N.C. Wyeth.

Endlessly drawing apples, an exercise demanded by Jamie’s first and only teacher, Carolyn Wyeth (N.C.’s daughter), took place under Carolyn’s watchful eye every day within his grandfather’s prop-laden (magical to any child or budding artist) studio in Chadds Ford. The apples of N.C., like the apples of Cézanne, were central to the youngest Wyeth’s early art education. Among other knowing, winking nods to her husband’s art and life, Phyllis planted several white-flowering apple trees between the main Museum buildings and the church.

The garden space, a vest-pocket urban park, softens the streetscape and traffic noise near the Museum. In concept and careful execution—simple, graceful, and natural—it is a quiet, self-effacing portrait of Phyllis herself. Working with noted landscape architect, Clara Batchelor of Cambridge, MA, Phyllis wanted her favorite wild rugosa bushes to frame the edges of this tight space bounded to the west by Route 1 and busy side streets. She insisted on leaving the lawn area mostly open with white enameled wooden benches scattered throughout the grounds.

The rose bushes against low, wooden picket fences yield white flowers in high summer. Occasionally, this green and white framing is punctuated by red rosa rugosa flowers—volunteers, red exclamation points, and reminders of Phyllis’s irrepressible unruliness and delight in nature’s random acts of beauty. These tough, gnarly, wild plants with their ability to withstand lashing winter storms, weathering Maine’s raggedy shorelines, destined to return each summer along with lupine, wild daylilies, and the Wyeths. Simply composed of locally-sourced, crushed natural stone, Phyllis’s meandering garden pathways metaphorically and literally connect her husband’s artworks to the history and traditions of American art seen within the main Farnsworth building including art by Wyeth’s father and his younger contemporaries working in Maine today. Their portraits from antebellum Maine and New England mingle with portraits of poets and artists—Robert Creeley, Rudy Burckhardt—and self-portraits by Louise Nevelson and Emilie Stark-Menneg.

Thus, Phyllis’s landscape design for the Farnsworth completes a remarkable dual portrait of herself and her husband. The garden and its pathways tell of nurturing and transformation—the perennial center and enduring heart of their half-century marriage that was also a creative collaboration between two independent spirits. For his part, Wyeth’s recent paintings of various, often strangely “unsettled” subjects are his way of keeping Phyllis with him, by his side, and alive to her wild, mischievous, numinous natural beauty and richly impasto-ed, gentle spirit.

 

Image at top, Jamie Wyeth, Phyllis in the Leaves, (Portrait of Phyllis Mills), on canvas, 20 x 24 in., 1968, collection of Jamie Wyeth (photo: courtesy of the artist).