Winter (Wyeth painting)

Wyeth was approaching his thirtieth birthday. No one then knew that he was approaching significant changes in his personal life and in his work.

The artist’s mother had a girlfriend who died in 1944 ^[2] . This death shocked both the mother and the artist's son, who responded to the event with the painting “Christmas Morning”. In fact, there was no Christmas in the picture, but a landscape with a sick woman in bed. The artist metaphorically tried to show the close relationship of man with the land on which she lived and upon death would become a part of this land and this landscape ^[2] .

In October 1945, his father’s car was hit by a train ^[2] . The catastrophe took two lives - the artist Newell Converse Wyeth , who turned 62 years old, and his two-year-old grandson ^[2] . The unexpected and tragic death in the province was an important event in the history of the family. The event difficultly affected the consciousness of Wyeth, who later spoke about this himself. So, he regretted that he did not create a portrait of his father. He wrote -

Young Andrew has a sense of responsibility for himself and his own creativity. From now on, he began to work as he constantly proved to himself, to his deceased father and to his memory, that he was grateful for a pleasant childhood, for his support and those mastery lessons that he received (had time to) from his father. The memory of his father became the incentive for the creation of several new paintings by Andrew Wyeth. Among them is the “Winter” of 1946.

Most of the plane of the painting is reserved for the image of the hill . Provincial Wyeth visited these places for years, because he himself admitted that he was well influenced by the centuries-sanded hills, wild bushes, lawns with berries, all these wild herbs that he willingly painted since childhood, seeing sketches with herbs by Albrecht Durer in his father’s library ^[2] .

The compositions in Wyeth’s paintings are usually not complicated, but he worked on them for a long time, looking for the most characteristic and necessary for a certain mood. All his landscape works have their own mood, almost always gloomy, but reliable. After the death of his father, he repeatedly visited the place of his death and finally transferred it to the picture. This is exactly the hill behind which Newell Converse Wyeth died ^[2] .

Something was missing in the desert and wild landscape. Finally he populated him with a youth figure. Another gust of wind blew out his short coat and ears of a winter hat. The young man just went down from the top of the hill and his whole figure is the embodiment of longing and anxiety. The feeling of anxiety is even the silhouette of the hill, which, as it raises the sides when breathing, is like a living being. Wyeth later wrote that the young man was like the personification of his wounded loss of soul, which in no way calmed down.

• Yurieva T.S. Andrew Wyeth, M., Fine Arts, 1986.