On the Threshold of Illness and Emotional Isolation

878 Emerging Infectious Diseases • www.cdc.gov/eid • Vol. 12, No. 5, May 2006 “I very thin and nervous so my father and mother took me out of school and had me tutored at home,” recalls Andrew Wyeth about his education after the third grade (1). The ailment that kept him away from his peers during childhood and adolescence was a “sinus condition,” later diagnosed as tuberculosis. “I played alone and wandered a great deal over the hills, painting watercolors that literally exploded, slapdash over my pages, and drew in pencil or pen and ink in a wild and undisciplined manner” (2). His precocious artistic talent was also reigned in and cultivated in the home environment. He learned from his father, painter, muralist, illustrator Newell Wyeth, who studied with foremost 19th-century illustrator, Howard Pyle (3). Influenced by Henry David Thoreau and the transcendentalists, Newell Wyeth promoted awareness of the metaphorical and metaphysical value in even the most mundane objects and advocated attention to and alignment with the subtleties of the natural world. He believed that “...a man can only paint that which he knows even more than intimately.... And to do that he has got to live around it, in it and be part of it” (4). His young son spent hours painting objects, only to lament that he could “never get close enough to an object or inside of it enough” (5), but the telescopic views of the domestic implements he painted throughout his career show this early still-life training. At Chadds Ford, the farming village in Pennsylvania where he was born, Wyeth worked with charcoal and oils and studied the masters, among them Albrecht Dürer, an early source of inspiration. In Maine, where the family spent summer months, he experimented with watercolors and painted landscapes in the style of Winslow Homer, with whom along with Thomas Eakins, he felt strong kinship. “They look magnificent, and with no reservations whatsoever, they represent the very best watercolors I ever saw,” wrote his father about the works in 20-year-old *Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, Atlanta, Georgia USA Andrew Wyeth (b. 1917). Christina Olson (1947) Tempera on panel (83.8 cm × 63.5 cm). Courtesy of Curtis Galleries, Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA