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Lot Essay
The eldest child of Newell Convers Wyeth and sister of Andrew Wyeth, Henriette Wyeth is best known for her psychologically revealing portraits and carefully constructed still lifes infused with mystery. Cyclamen and Santos is one of a number of still life explorations that she produced during her career that pair religious elements with blooming flowers.
Through a deliberate process of composition and the choice to present mundane objects and plants together, Wyeth imparts at once a sense of time passing and timelessness. "Her work is a testimony to the enduring power which abides strongly in certain forms of fragility. In a flower detail of a still life, in a child's wrist, she makes a little essay on mortality, but one reclaimed from morbidity by its celebration of present beauty." (P. Horgan, Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light, exhibition catalogue, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1994, p. 69) Wyeth says, "The reason I paint flowers is that I see them fading. This reminds me of the eternally renewed, the springtime, all of that, because I feel death and disaster lurk right behind them." (Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light, p. 69)
In the present work, Wyeth presents a skillfully crafted arrangement of two religious statues situated on a table between potted cyclamen plants. The table's soft brushwork, painted in tones of blue, gray and brown, blends almost seamlessly into the background, and the artist's play between shadow and light further highlights the strong diagonal composition created by the placement of still life elements. The white cyclamen plant is placed in the immediate foreground, and the absence of its pot extends beyond the picture plane into the viewer's space.
"Henriette Wyeth's deeply personal art is a statement of her response to life, whether to living subjects or inert objects, all revealed in the light of her inmost nature. Granting the beauty and power of her technique, it is the radiant personal reflections in her paintings that lift her into the company of artists whose truth lives after them, and becomes ours." (Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light, p. 88) The wonderfully unique ambiguity and private vision of Wyeth's work is celebrated in Cyclamen and Santos.
The present work is accompanied by the book Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light by Paul Horgan.
Through a deliberate process of composition and the choice to present mundane objects and plants together, Wyeth imparts at once a sense of time passing and timelessness. "Her work is a testimony to the enduring power which abides strongly in certain forms of fragility. In a flower detail of a still life, in a child's wrist, she makes a little essay on mortality, but one reclaimed from morbidity by its celebration of present beauty." (P. Horgan, Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light, exhibition catalogue, Museum of New Mexico, Santa Fe, New Mexico, 1994, p. 69) Wyeth says, "The reason I paint flowers is that I see them fading. This reminds me of the eternally renewed, the springtime, all of that, because I feel death and disaster lurk right behind them." (Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light, p. 69)
In the present work, Wyeth presents a skillfully crafted arrangement of two religious statues situated on a table between potted cyclamen plants. The table's soft brushwork, painted in tones of blue, gray and brown, blends almost seamlessly into the background, and the artist's play between shadow and light further highlights the strong diagonal composition created by the placement of still life elements. The white cyclamen plant is placed in the immediate foreground, and the absence of its pot extends beyond the picture plane into the viewer's space.
"Henriette Wyeth's deeply personal art is a statement of her response to life, whether to living subjects or inert objects, all revealed in the light of her inmost nature. Granting the beauty and power of her technique, it is the radiant personal reflections in her paintings that lift her into the company of artists whose truth lives after them, and becomes ours." (Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light, p. 88) The wonderfully unique ambiguity and private vision of Wyeth's work is celebrated in Cyclamen and Santos.
The present work is accompanied by the book Henriette Wyeth: The Artifice of Blue Light by Paul Horgan.