The paintings of Andrew Wyeth have won the reclusive artist a tremendous amount of fame; their quiet views of landscapes and figures seem quintessentially American and timeless. Since the late 1930s, Wyeth has restricted himself to a small universe of New England backdrops and a handful of unconventional models, but his images, executed in watercolor and tempera, radiate a deep emotional resonance in isolated glimpses. Although Wyeth is sometimes dismissed by the avant-garde art establishment as a sentimental painter, the precise detail and photo-realistic quality of his works place him securely in the tradition of artists like Albrecht Duerer, Winslow Homer, and Thomas Eakins. "People who don't look at my work think I'm a painter of old oaken buckets," Wyeth remarked in the 1991 biography by Richard Meryman, Andrew Wyeth. "I'm anything but that!"

Wyeth was born in 1917 at home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, the last of six Wyeth...