Andrew Wyeth b. 1917

M. Knoedler & Co., New York
John Hay Whitney, New York, 1955 (received as a birthday present from Mrs. Whitney, acquired from the above)
Mrs. John Hay Whitney, New York, 1982

San Francisco, California, M. H. DeYoung Memorial Museum; Santa Barbara, California, Santa Barbara Museum of Art; Wilmington, Delaware, The Wilmington Society of the Fine Arts, Andrew Wyeth, July 1956-February 1957, no. 29, illustrated, also illustrated on the cover of the catalogue
London, England, The Tate Gallery, The John Hay Whitney Collection, December 1960-January 1961, no. 66, illustrated
Buffalo, New York, Albright-Knox Art Gallery, Andrew Wyeth: Temperas, Water Colors and Drawings, November-December 1962, no. 24, p. 10, illustrated p. 33
New York, Whitney Museum of American Art, Andrew Wyeth: Temperas, Watercolors, Dry Brush, Drawings, 1938-1966, February 1967-April 1967 
Boston, Massachusetts, Museum of Fine Arts, Andrew Wyeth, July-September 1970, no. 27, pp. 28, 78, illustrated in color p. 29
Tokyo, Japan, National Museum of Modern Art; Kyoto, Japan, National Museum of Modern Art, Andrew Wyeth, April-June 1974, no. 15, illustrated

Lloyd Goodrich, "Andrew Wyeth," Art in America, October 1955, pp. 9-23
"Many Andrew Wyeth paintings to 'come home' in show here," Journal-Every Evening, December 1956
Jean Reeves, "Wyeth--show lender drives 500 miles to be a vistor," Buffalo Evening News, November 1962, p. 46
Richard Merryman, Andrew Wyeth, Boston, Massachusetts, 1968
Wanda Corn, "Andrew Wyeth at the deYoung Museum," American Art Review, September, 1973, pp. 91-7
The Art of Andrew Wyeth, Greenwich, Connecticut, 1973, illustrated in color pp. 90-1 
"American Realism," Eastern Review, December 1977, pp. 34-7

Born and raised in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, Andrew Wyeth’s artistic training began at an early age.  The youngest son of the celebrated American illustrator N.C. Wyeth, Andrew observed the landscape, farmhouses and local figures of Chadds Ford, making quick pencil drawings and painting in drybrush and tempera, each time capturing the distinctive nature of his subject.

Thomas Hoving observes, “Subject matter has always been of paramount importance to Wyeth, especially when it comes to him unexpectedly, or, as he likes to put it, ‘through the back door.’  He may start a scene and then see something days or weeks later that will make him completely change the first impression and, of course, the picture.  He thoroughly believes, like one of his favorites, John Constable, the English painter of the eighteenth-nineteenth century, that you never have to add life to a scene.  If you quietly sit and wait long enough, patiently enough, life will come—‘sort of an accident in the right spot.’

“These ‘accidents’ are the foundations on which the bulk of Wyeth’s best visions are based and are relatively unknown. . . For the most part only the pictures’ titles offer any clues to the vivid experiences behind an inspiration (Andrew Wyeth: Autobiography, Boston, p. 11).  In the present picture, Wyeth finds inspiration in his wife’s wicker laundry basket, which was left outside overnight and found drifted with snow in the morning. Sunlight streams across the picture, illuminating the basket and casting a shadow against the white-washed walls of the house.  According to Mary Landa, this building was originally the one-room schoolhouse in Chadds Ford.  After a larger school was built, N.C. Wyeth purchased the building and converted it into a home, where Andrew and his wife Betsy lived at the time Monday Morning was painted. 

As Wyeth himself observes, “I’m not much for the new thing or the new object.  I like to go back again and again because I think you can always find new things.  There are always new emotions in going back to something that I know very well.  I suppose this is very odd, because most people have to find fresh things to paint.  I’m actually bored by fresh things to paint.  To make an old thing I’ve seen for years seem fresh is much more exciting to me” (Thomas Hoving, Two Worlds of Andrew Wyeth: Kuerners and Olsons, 1976, New York, p. 39).