Kuerner Farm | |
Location | 415 Ring Road Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania |
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Coordinates | 39°52′09″N75°34′32″W / 39.8692°N 75.5756°W |
Area | 33 acres (13 ha) |
Built | c. 1814 |
Architect | Caleb Ring |
Architectural style | Colonial |
NRHP reference No. | 11000564 (original) 14000924 (increase) |
Significant dates | |
Added to NRHP | June 23, 2011 |
Boundary increase | August 25, 2014 |
Designated NHL | June 23, 2011 |
The Kuerner Farm, also known as Ring Farm, is an historic farm which is located in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, United States. It is notable for its association with artist Andrew Wyeth, who created about one-third of his work, more than 1,000 paintings and drawings, on subjects he found there during a span of seventy-seven years.
The farm was listed in the National Register of Historic Places and declared a National Historic Landmark in 2011. [1] The property abuts the Brandywine Battlefield, another National Historic Landmark. The farm is open to public tours, operated by the Brandywine River Museum.
The Battle of Brandywine, fought nearby on September 11, 1777, left a cannonball and grapeshot in the farm's fields. Continental troops and militia units marched past on Ring road, but no actual fighting on the property can be documented. Brandywine Battlefield State Park is about a half-mile north of the farm. Caleb Ring built the farmhouse sometime around 1814. A third story was added circa 1850. [2]
Illustrator Howard Pyle taught art students, including Andrew Wyeth's father N. C. Wyeth, at Turner's Mill on US 1, just north of the farm, during the summers from 1898 to 1903.
In 1926, Karl Kuerner and his wife Anna rented the farm, which they bought in 1940. [3] Karl had been a sheepherder near the Black Forest in his native Germany, and had been a machine gunner in the German Army during World War I, before moving to Philadelphia in 1926. Andrew Wyeth's first painting of the farm was completed in 1932, when Wyeth was just fifteen years old. [3]
In 1945, N. C. Wyeth, and Andrew Nyeth's three-year-old nephew, Newell Convers Wyeth II (b. 1941) were killed when their car, stalled at the railroad crossing near the northwest corner of the farm, was struck by a train. [4]
Andrew Wyeth met Helga Testorf in 1971 while she was nursing Karl Kuerner at the farm. A German immigrant, she lived across Ring Road from the farm with her husband. She soon began secretly modeling for Wyeth in a famous series of paintings and drawings. That year the first nude painting in the series was painted in the sewing room in the farm house. The works, numbering more than 240, remained secret until 1987, when they were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art.
Karl Kuerner died in 1979, followed by Anna in 1997. In 1999, the farm was acquired by the Brandywine Conservancy, which offers tours of the farm through its Brandywine River Museum. [3]
It was designated as a National Historic Landmark and listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2011. In 2014, the listing was expanded to include the former schoolhouse used by Wyeth as a studio. [5]
Some of the paintings Andrew Wyeth created here include:
It was here also that Wyeth created many of The Helga Pictures , a series of more than 200 works all involving the model Helga Testorf, whom he met while she worked as a nurse caring for the farm's owner, Karl Kuerner.
External videos | |
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Experience: Kuerner Farm Wyeth (3 minutes), WHYY-TV [6] | |
Andrew Wyeth Studio Tour (1:34), Wanda Kaluza |
Henriette Wyeth Hurd was an American artist noted for her portraits and still life paintings. The eldest daughter of illustrator N.C. Wyeth, she studied painting with her father and brother Andrew Wyeth at their home and studio in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Andrew Newell Wyeth was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He believed he was also an abstractionist, portraying subjects in a new, meaningful way. The son of N. C. Wyeth and father of Jamie Wyeth, he was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. James H. Duff explores the art and lives of the three men in An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art. Raised with an appreciation of nature, Wyeth took walks that fired his imagination. Henry David Thoreau, Robert Frost, and King Vidor's The Big Parade (1925) inspired him intellectually and artistically. Wyeth featured in a documentary The Metaphor in which he discussed Vidor's influence on the creation of his works of art, like Winter 1946 and Portrait of Ralph Kline. Wyeth was also inspired by Winslow Homer and Renaissance artists.
Newell Convers Wyeth, known as N. C. Wyeth, was an American painter and illustrator. He was a student of Howard Pyle and became one of America's most well-known illustrators. Wyeth created more than 3,000 paintings and illustrated 112 books — 25 of them for Scribner's, the Scribner Classics, which is the body of work for which he is best known. The first of these, Treasure Island, was one of his masterpieces and the proceeds paid for his studio. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when the camera and photography began to compete with his craft. Sometimes seen as melodramatic, his illustrations were designed to be understood quickly. Wyeth, who was both a painter and an illustrator, understood the difference, and said in 1908, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other."
Brandywine Creek is a tributary of the Christina River in southeastern Pennsylvania and northern Delaware in the United States. The Lower Brandywine is 20.4 miles (32.8 km) long and is a designated Pennsylvania Scenic River with several tributary streams. The East Branch and West Branch of the creek originate within 2 miles (3 km) of each other on the slopes of Welsh Mountain in Honey Brook Township, Pennsylvania, about 20 miles (32 km) northwest of their confluence.
Chadds Ford Township is an affluent township in Delaware County, Pennsylvania, United States. It is located about 25 miles (40 km) southwest of Philadelphia.
James Browning Wyeth is an American realist painter, son of Andrew Wyeth, and grandson of N.C. Wyeth. He was raised in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania, and is artistic heir to the Brandywine School tradition — painters who worked in the rural Brandywine River area of Delaware and Pennsylvania, portraying its people, animals, and landscape.
Christina's World is a 1948 painting by American painter Andrew Wyeth and one of the best-known American paintings of the mid-20th century. It is a tempera work done in a realist style, depicting a woman semi-reclining on the ground in a treeless, mostly tawny field, looking up at a gray house on the horizon, a barn, and various other small outbuildings are adjacent to the house. It is held by the Museum of Modern Art, in New York.
The Brandywine Museum of Art is a museum of regional and American art located on U.S. Route 1 in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania on the banks of the Brandywine Creek. The museum showcases the work of Andrew Wyeth, a major American realist painter, and his family: his father N.C. Wyeth, illustrator of many children's classics; his sister Ann Wyeth McCoy, a composer and painter; and his son Jamie Wyeth, a contemporary American realist painter.
The Brandywine School was a style of illustration—as well as an artists colony in Wilmington, Delaware and in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, near the Brandywine River—both founded by artist Howard Pyle (1853–1911) at the end of the 19th century. The works produced there were widely published in adventure novels, magazines, and romances in the early 20th century. Pyle’s teachings would influence such notable illustrators as N.C. Wyeth, Maxfield Parrish, Harvey Dunn, and Norman Rockwell. Pyle himself would come to be known as the "Father of American Illustration." Many works related to the Brandywine School may be seen at the Brandywine River Museum of Art, in Chadds Ford.
The Brandywine Battlefield Historic Site is a National Historical Landmark. The historic park is owned and operated by the Pennsylvania Historical and Museum Commission, on 52 acres (210,000 m2), near Chadds Ford, Delaware County, Pennsylvania in the United States.
The N. C. Wyeth House and Studio is a historic house museum and artist's studio on Murphy Road in Chadds Ford Township, Pennsylvania, United States. Beginning with its construction in 1911, it served as the principal home and studio of artist N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945). It was restored to its original appearance around the time of his death. The property is managed by the Brandywine River Museum, which offers tours. It was designated a National Historic Landmark District in 1997.
John Willard McCoy (1910–1989) was an American artist who painted landscapes, portraits, and still lifes. He was married to the composer Ann Wyeth, the daughter of painter N.C. Wyeth and sister of painter Andrew Wyeth.
The Helga Pictures are a series of more than 268 paintings and drawings of German model Helga Testorf created by American artist Andrew Wyeth between 1971 and 1985.
George Alexis Weymouth, better known as Frolic Weymouth, was an American artist, whip or stager, and conservationist. He served on the United States Commission of Fine Arts in the 1970s and was a member of the Du Pont family.
Carolyn Wyeth, daughter of N.C. Wyeth and sister of Andrew Wyeth, was a well-known artist in her own right. Her hometown was Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. She worked and taught out of N. C. Wyeth House and Studio. Her nephew, Jamie Wyeth was one of her students.
Evening at Kuerners is a 1970 painting by the American artist Andrew Wyeth. It is one of Wyeth's paintings of the Kuerner Farm in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The white farmhouse and a springhouse are depicted at sunset. In the foreground are also two leafless trees and a stream of water which runs from a nearby pond.
American composer, pianist and painter Ann Wyeth McCoy was the youngest daughter of artist-illustrator N.C. Wyeth and the fourth of his five children. She was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania.
Maidenhair is a 1974 painting by the American artist Andrew Wyeth. It depicts a young bride-to-be sitting alone in the Old German Meeting House in Waldoboro, Maine.
Betsy James Wyeth was an author and art collector, who was also the business manager and archivist of her husband, artist Andrew Wyeth.
Painter's Folly is an Italianate historic house located in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Purchased by the township in 2018 with the intention of preserving it and turning into a museum, the house was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 2024.