The motorcycle seen at center of the present work belonged to Jimmy Lynch, a local to Chadds Ford who was a close family friend of the Wyeths. Lynch himself appears in a number of watercolors and sketches Wyeth completed throughout the course of his career. Lynch also posed as the main subject of a major tempera the artist completed in 1990, entitled Man and the Moon (Fig. 1), in the collection of the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art in Kansas City. Both paintings pay homage to this character in Wyeth’s life, who he described as, “a marvelously natural person—a piece of the earth … He was a Pennsylvania version of Walter Anderson … I liked him because he was of the earth. He was an appealing vagabond. I was taken by his posture, the way he walked—so loose and casual, very American” (as quoted in Thomas Hoving, Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography, Kansas City, 1995, p. 82).
Drifting is a quintessential example of Wyeth’s unique approach to symbolic realism—a composition rich in naturalistic detail, rendered carefully in the artist’s preferred medium of tempera, while also biographical in its subject. Wyeth once explained, “I’m not at all interested in painting the object just as it is in nature. Certainly I’m much more interested in the mood of a thing than the truth of a thing . . . intensity—painting emotion into objects—is the only thing I care about.”