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In 1997 thanks to the support of MBNA, the Farnsworth Museum added an extension to the main museum building and purchased and renovated an old Methodist church located on block of land adjacent to the campus. At the same time the Farnsworth entered into an understanding with the famous Wyeth family of artists to house the endeavor of two major cataloguing projects and to display a perpetual series of exhibitions of work by N.C., Andrew and James Wyeth. The Wyeth Study Center comprises two galleries in which Andrew Wyeth's work is displayed. The Wyeth Center houses exhibitions of N.C. and James Wyeth's paintings. The Wyeth family's association with midcoast Maine began in the early 1920s when N.C. Wyeth purchased a house in Port Clyde. The house, named "Eight Bells" after Winslow Homer's famous painting, became a summer refuge for the famed illustrator and his family. Here he completed many of the paintings that are now in the Farnsworth's collection. One of these, Bright and Fair—Eight Bells, 1936, a portrait of the house, is today one of the most admired of all N.C.'s Maine works. |
