enlarge Peter Ralston photo

The artist purposefully kept much of his life under wraps. He had a hand-lettered sign on his studio door in Port Clyde, warning off intruders: “NOTICE: If it is the second coming of Christ, call me out. Otherwise, let me alone.”

enlarge Peter Ralston photo

enlarge Peter Ralston photo

Peter Ralston photo

enlarge The Museum of Modern Art, New York

“Christina’s World,” a 1948 painting in which Andrew Wyeth depicted his Cushing neighbor, Christina Olson, crouched on the lawn of her home, became his best-known work of art.

Read Bob Keyes' 2005 profile of Andrew Wyeth

ANDREW NEWELL WYETH

JULY 12, 1917: Born in Chadds Ford, Pa.; father is illustrator N.C. Wyeth.

1920: The Wyeths purchase a summer house in Port Clyde, Maine; Andrew will summer and paint there throughout his life.

1937: Wyeth's first one-man show of Maine watercolors sells out at the Macbeth Gallery in New York.

1940: Andrew, 23, marries Betsy James and begins going to Cushing, Maine, regularly; he becomes the youngest artist ever elected to membership in the American Watercolor Society.

1943: Wyeth gains national recognition when The Saturday Evening Post uses his painting "The Hunter" on its cover.

1948: Wyeth paints his best-known work, "Christina's World."

1963: Wyeth is nominated for the Presidential Medal of Freedom by President Kennedy, the first visual artist so honored. On Dec. 27, Wyeth appears on the cover of Time Magazine.

1967: His show at the Whitney Museum of American Art breaks the museum's attendance record.

1970: Wyeth has the first major solo exhibition of art ever held at the White House in Washington, D.C.

1971-85: Wyeth secretly paints Helga Testorf, his neighbor in Chadds Ford, creating hundreds of images of her, including nudes.

1976: Wyeth becomes the first native-born living American to receive a retrospective exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum in New York.

1986: The "Helga" pictures are first shown publicly.

1987: The Museum of Modern Art features Wyeth in its first major show of a living artist.

1990: Wyeth is the first artist to receive the Congressional Gold Medal.

2001: Exhibition and national tour of "Andrew Wyeth: Close Friends," organized by the Mississippi Museum of Art, marks the first critical look at a significant body of Wyeth's work depicting the artist's African-American friends and neighbors in Chadds Ford from 1933 to the present.

2005: Wyeth, 87, is honored at Maine College of Art's annual Art Honors Gala. The High Museum of Art and Philadelphia Museum of Art organize a major retrospective of his work.

JAN. 16, 2009: Wyeth dies at home in Chadds Ford.

— Compiled by Staff Researcher Beth Murphy

Andrew Wyeth, America's foremost realist painter, spent his youth puttering around in skiffs at Port Clyde, making friends with local fishermen and learning his way on the water.

As he developed his skills as an artist, he populated his paintings with nostalgic and oftentimes moody images of the coastal landscape that he fell in love with as a youngster.

On a blustery winter morning Friday that could have served as the background for one of those paintings, Wyeth died in his sleep at his home in Chadds Ford, Pa., in the presence of his wife, Betsy, and their two children. He was 91.

Around Maine and around the world, friends, colleagues, admirers, scholars and politicians remembered Wyeth as one of the 20th century's finest realist painters, a man who translated his passion for Maine into watercolor and egg tempera paintings that formed an indelible image of the state for an international audience.

He spent every summer of his life but one in Maine.

"Maine is a very different world than Chadds Ford, but Andy sure did love it here," said photographer Peter Ralston, a longtime family friend and Wyeth confidante. "Andy didn't travel far and experiment or dabble in all sorts of far-fetched things. He just went deep, and absolutely had Maine in his blood.

"Andy painted his whole life, and all facets of his life. The big themes in his work run deep and are lifelong."

In a 2005 interview with the Portland Press Herald/Maine Sunday Telegram, Wyeth had a simple explanation for his art.

"I paint the things that emotionally mean a lot to me," Wyeth said. "One goes as far as one's heart takes him. Anything else to me is just a technical trick."

Wyeth spent nearly his entire life in Pennsylvania and Maine. He was born in Chadds Ford in 1917, the youngest of five children of N.C. and Carolyn Wyeth. His father was an illustrator who introduced Wyeth to art at a young age. He was home-schooled, and learned the arts and humanities from his father – knowledge that Wyeth later passed on to one of his sons, the Maine-based painter Jamie Wyeth.

Wyeth is also survived by another son, art dealer Nicholas Wyeth of Cushing, and a granddaughter.

Wyeth flourished in art and had his first solo exhibition at a New York gallery in 1937, at age 20. He sold every painting at that show.

Wyeth made his most famous painting in Cushing in 1948. "Christina's World" shows a neighbor, Christina Olson, crouched and almost crawling along the lawn of her family home. Wyeth never lets the viewer see her face, but manages to convey the struggle of the degenerative muscle disease that keeps her from walking.

It's that subtext in all his work – the untold story that hovers beneath the surface of his paintings – that distinguishes Wyeth from many other realist painters, said art historian John Wilmerding of Princeton University.

"It's that mysterious area of content that is his long-lasting gift," said Wilmerding, who owns a summer home in Maine. "There is no getting around the fact that he is one of the quintessential realists. I guess I would view Wyeth as the archetype of American realism for our time."

SHRUGGED OFF ART WORLD TRENDS

What makes his accomplishments remarkable is the fact that he completed his most lasting work during the height of America's love affair with abstract expressionism. Although he remained popular, the art establishment viewed him with disdain in midcentury, because of his embrace of the landscape motif.

"In an era that was all about abstraction, he refocused public attention on realism, narrative, landscape and the figure," said Thomas Denenberg, chief curator and acting director of the Portland Museum of Art, which owns nine of his works. "He is the great painter of the narrative tradition of the 20th century.

"People's vision of the American landscape is Wyeth in Maine...