4 Ways of Looking at Andrew Wyeth's "Wind from the Sea"

Andrew Wyeth, Wind from the Sea (1947)

Nancy K. Anderson, in her absorbing essay “Wind from the Sea: Painting Truth beneath the Facts” (in Andrew Wyeth: Looking Out, Looking In by Nancy K. Anderson and Charles Brock, 2014), writes,

Wind from the Sea is first, a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill. Far from a replication of a bedroom window, the painting is a disciplined distillation of object and experience with an expansive subtext of personal symbolism. For Wyeth, the painting became a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness, and also a metaphorical portrait of Christina – stoic, strong, yet feminine. Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This passage suggests at least four ways of looking at Wyeth’s great picture:

1. As “a superbly constructed image rendered with great technical skill”;

2. As “a reflection of Maine in all its weathered toughness”;

3. As “a metaphorical portrait of Christina”;

4. As “an image haunted by death.”

These four perspectives intrigue me. I want to consider each them in more detail. 

1. A Superbly Constructed Image

I like this perspective. It admires Wind from the Sea for the artful way it’s painted. You don’t have to know the picture’s backstory to appreciate the technical virtuosity of its brushwork – the way Wyeth conveys the delicate lace curtains billowing in the wind, the way he renders their bird-and-flower pattern, the way he captures their disintegrating texture. It’s all right there on the surface. All you have to do is look. It’s a mimetic triumph. 

2.  A Reflection of Maine

Well, maybe. What is it about the picture that tells you it’s Maine and not, say, Connecticut, or New Hampshire, or New Brunswick? I don’t see any clues that connect this painting specifically to Maine. In order to make that connection, you have to know something about its background. At a minimum, you have to know that Wyeth painted it in Maine and that it depicts a Maine landscape as seen by Wyeth out the third-floor bedroom window of an old Maine farmhouse. 

3. A Metaphorical Portrait of Christina

Now we’re really delving into this painting’s backstory. Anderson, in her essay, tells us that Christina is Christina Olson. She and her brother Alvaro lived in a three-story, eighteenth-century, saltwater farmhouse on Hathorn Point, Cushing, Maine. The house was built by their maternal ancestors, the Hathorns. Christina, crippled by a degenerative muscle condition, couldn’t walk, climb stairs, or groom herself. Alvaro looked after her. The house was in poor condition. Rags were stuffed in broken windows. The clapboard exterior, originally painted white, had been stripped bare by sun and wind. Inside, the wallpaper was curling away from the walls. The curtains hung in tatters. Christina and Alvaro lived mostly on the ground floor. Rooms on the upper floors were rarely used. 

Wyeth first met Christina in the summer of 1939. Betsy James, soon to become Wyeth’s wife, introduced him to her at the Olson house. While he was there, Wyeth made a watercolor of the place. Following that first visit, Wyeth returned to the house every summer. As his friendship with the Olsons deepened, he was given free run of the place. Over time he studied it from every angle, inside and out. 

On a hot August day, 1947, Wyeth was at the Olson house, in an abandoned third-floor bedroom, intending to make a watercolor study of a dormer window. Anderson, in her essay, tells what happened next:

When noonday sun sent the temperature soaring, he crossed to the other side of the room and opened a window with a view to the sea. A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly. Wyeth made a quick sketch and later told a friend that the chance event had made his “hair stand on end.” By early fall, he had translated that momentary experience into one of his most remarkable paintings, Wind from the Sea.

Once you’ve read that, you see the painting in a completely different way. You see it as a live image, a record of a real event. But do you see it as a metaphorical portrait of Christina? That seems more of a stretch. Anderson writes,

Knowing Wyeth’s predilection for investing images with symbolic references, it is easy to see how the solid straight window frame that anchors Wind from the Sea came to serve him as a metaphor for Christina’s strength of character and how the delicate birds on the disintegrating lace reflected her feminine grace.

Okay, fair enough. But not everyone who views Wind from the Sea will know about its connection with Christina. That connection is not apparent on the face of the painting.

4. An Image Haunted by Death

Anderson writes,

Wind from the Sea, like many of Wyeth’s paintings, is also an image haunted by death. Interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay. Outside the window, parallel tracks lead to an undefined shore, the river flows to the sea, and at the forested horizon is a cemetery.

This is interesting. Anderson tells me something I would not have realized on my own – that those tiny specks of white on the far shore are grave markers. Is the presence of those grave markers sufficient evidence to support Anderson’s “haunted by death” reading? Maybe, especially if you read it in conjunction with her observation that the “interior elements record the passage of time and the onset of decay.” 

Unquestionably, Wyeth is interested in subjects that show “the passage of time and the onset of decay.” I share this interest. It’s one of the reasons I love his work. His paintings exude a delicious melancholy. But to say Wind from the Sea is death-haunted seems to me to conflict with the way the breeze has stirred those old curtains to life. Isn’t that the real point of the picture? “A soft ocean breeze lifted curtains that had lain undisturbed for decades. Birds delicately crocheted on the decaying lace appeared to fly.” Wind from the Sea has the breath of life.