Among the paintings in Andrew Wyeth: The Greenville Collection, is the 1957 tempera, Hay Ledge. A major painting completed when Wyeth was only forty years of age, Hay Ledge is a poignant interior glimpse into the Olson barn in Cushing, Maine. The Olson family and their farm are central figures in many of Wyeth’s most renowned paintings, including his masterpiece, Christina’s World (1948). In Hay Ledge, an abandoned white dory is starkly lit in the dark confines of a loft. Wyeth has said it was a tribute to Alvaro Olson, who stopped lobstering and took up truck gardening so he could care for his sister Christina, who was crippled by polio.
“Alvaro used to fish,” Wyeth recalled, “and then he realized that he would be off all day hauling his nets, with his sister alone after the mother and father died, and he would be the only one who could take care of her. And so he stopped lobstering in his dory. He stopped, just like that, one day.”
The painting was the cornerstone of the former Holly and Arthur Magill collection, which was on loan to the Greenville County Museum of Art from 1978 until 1989. Hay Ledge was purchased in honor of the Magills, who paid half the cost of building the Museum, which opened in 1974, and who created its endowment in 1992.
"The purchase of Hay Ledge is a tribute to the extraordinary role that Holly and Arthur Magill played in the development of this community,” said Museum Director Thomas Styron. “Their generous support of the visual arts is well known, but the Magills, by their example, also inspired a new era of cultural philanthropy in Upstate South Carolina.”
For more information, see Andrew Wyeth: The Greenville Collection.
| contact
| calendar | home
©2006, Greenville County
Museum of Art
420 College Street, Greenville SC 29601
864-271-7570 or info@greenvillemuseum.org