ANDREW WYETH | DESERTED LIGHT

Coe Kerr Gallery, New York

Private collection, 1979 (acquired from the above; sold: Christie's, New York, May 21, 2008, lot 6)

Hammer Galleries, New York (acquired at the above sale)

Somerville Manning Gallery, Greenville, Delaware, by 2010

Acquired by the present owner from the above, 2013

"American Masters and Blackwell's Island," American Fine Art Magazine, May 2013, pp. 66-69, 114-19, illustrated

Kelly Compton, "Spring Comes to the Brandywine River Valley," Fine Art Connoisseur, May 2013, pp. 92-93, illustrated

Executed in 1977, Andrew Wyeth's Deserted Light depicts the Southern Island Lighthouse, approximately two years before his wife, Betsy James, purchased Southern Island in Tenants Harbor, Maine. Wyeth began spending each summer in Maine at the age of three, when his father, the celebrated American illustrator N.C. Wyeth, bought a rambling old sea captain’s house in Port Clyde at the end of the St. George Peninsula. 

Wyeth once remarked, "Maine to me is almost like going to the surface of the moon. I feel things are just hanging on the surface and that it's all going to blow away. In Maine, everything seems to be dwindling with terrific speed" (as quoted in Thomas Hoving, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons, New York, 1976, p. 3).