Inspired by a line from Henry David Thoreau’s 1854 book, Walden, or Life in the Woods, Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination explores the artist’s lifelong admiration of the influential naturalist and his own sustained engagement with the natural world. Between his birthplace of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and his summers spent in coastal Maine, Wyeth was exposed to two distinct climatic zones—one lush and temperate, the other rocky and cool—and he found in each a trove of imaginative potential. More visionary than scientific, Wyeth’s resulting “plant portraits” are, at times, vaguely anthropomorphic. They also revel in nature’s organic abstraction and embrace pure pattern and surface, brilliantly capturing the essence of regional flora and the larger environmental networks to which they belong. Examining Wyeth’s rootedness in the landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine through an ecocritical lens, Every Leaf & Twig brings together these twin ecosystems and considers the artistic response each inspired.

Featuring nearly 35 works on paper drawn from the holdings of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art, many never before seen by the public, Every Leaf & Twig reveals the environmental stakes of Wyeth’s botanical drawings and watercolors, both as visual records of species and environments threatened by contemporary ecological crises and of his own creative study and stewardship of these fragile—and deeply personal—ecosystems.

Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination is organized by the Brandywine Museum of Art.

Support for Every Leaf & Twig: Andrew Wyeth’s Botanical Imagination is generously provided by CT Department of Economic and Community Development, CT Humanities, and the Charles M. and Deborah G. Royce Exhibition Fund.

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)
Buttonwood, Study for The Hunter, 1943
Drybrush watercolor, 19 ½ x 29 ½ in.
Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
© 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)
Rose Hips, 1981
Watercolor, 13 x 22 ¼ in.
Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
© 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)
Coot Hunter Study, 1941
Watercolor, 21 ½ x 29.38 in.
Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
© 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY

Andrew Wyeth (American, 1917–2009)
Secret, 2008
Watercolor, 16 ⅞ x 19 in.
Collection of the Wyeth Foundation for American Art
© 2024 Andrew Wyeth/Artists Rights Society (ARS), NY