Betsy James Wyeth was Andrew Wyeth’s partner in life and in art, and a creative force in her own right. The collection of her husband’s work that she formed and documented with the highest professional archival standards and an early adoption of digital cataloguing strategies includes the full range of one of the defining artistic legacies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, from the most preliminary studies that offer a rare glimpse into creative process to masterpieces of the watercolor and egg tempera media for which he is best known. The collection is nearly evenly divided between Pennsylvania and Maine subjects, and artworks are generally housed at the Wyeth Study Center office in their state of creation.
In addition to works of art, our two locations also facilitate access to hundreds of rare books of the Wyeth family, thousands of pages of original letters, and the manuscript collection management records of Betsy James Wyeth. Because the history we archive is so recent, including still-living correspondents and sensitive data on current owners of Wyeth artworks, this is not yet an open access collection and research requests can be granted on a case-by-case basis. Migration from a proprietary internal database to a publicly accessible cloud-based software is underway, until which time reference questions should be directed to [email protected]. Loan requests are welcomed and the standards of the American Alliance of Museums are followed in evaluating such requests.