In Bog Hay, Andrew Wyeth deftly combines the fluidity of watercolor with the texture of drybrush to bring an emotionally charged realism to his landscape. The details are simple yet potent: sun illuminating individual pieces of hay, wind blowing laundry on lines, afternoon sky casting shadows on stone walls. The individual elements combine to create a poetic whole, rendered in melancholic, monochromatic tones. This is the artist’s hallmark: imbuing a seemingly innocuous landscape with unexpected psychological depth.

Wyeth was deeply inspired by the distinctive characteristics of varying landscapes. Throughout his life, the artist split time between “the depths of dirt and earth” that characterized his home state of Pennsylvania and the “dry bones and desiccated sinews'' embodied by his summer destination of Maine (Wyeth quoted in Thomas Hoving, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: A Conversation with Andrew Wyeth, 1976, p. 150). Bog Hay clearly reflects these dualities: density and sparsity, fertility and decay. The rich green swaths of watercolor suggest nature’s bounty and resilience, whereas the splintering passages of drybrush speak to its fragility. The coexistence of these contradictory states speaks to the transience of nature and of life.

Although Wyeth does not include any actual people in Bog Hay, traces of human activity are evident in the baled hay, the hung laundry and the tidy farmhouse. In this subtle way, Wyeth’s landscapes often become symbolic portraits of the land’s inhabitants. Of his masterpiece Weather Side, executed in the same year as Bog Hay, the artist said “the windows are eyes or pieces of the soul almost…Each has its specific role in helping to explain the overall personality of the portrait of the house and its occupants” (Hoving, 1976, p. 153; see figure 1). Wyeth often described works like Bog Hay as portraits, underscoring the psychological impact of a humble landscape seemingly devoid of human participants.