Jamie Wyeth, born in 1946, is a third-generation painter in America’s first family of art. Following in the footsteps of his father Andrew, Jamie Wyeth left school after the sixth grade to become an artist. Mentored by his father and his Aunt Carolyn, Wyeth experienced both criticism and praise from the art world for his realist depictions of American scenes.

Like his father and grandfather, Wyeth spent much of his life painting the Brandywine Valley and is the modern standard-bearer of the Brandywine school of art. This school, attended by Wyeth’s Grandfather N.C., focuses on teaching the “pictorial idea” of a painting. For Wyeth this idea means capturing real moments and stories from his life, as if creating a painted diary. Family members claim that Wyeth’s colorful emotion-filled paintings are closer to the work of grandfather than his father, despite the two never meeting (N.C. died in a tragic accident a year before Wyeth was born).

Wyeth continues to live in the Brandywine Valley, yet uses a light house on an island in Maine as his studio. He enjoys the peace and quiet the lighthouse provides and spends his days painting accompanied by a menagerie of pets, including a 600-pound pig the artist adopted after it broke into his studio and ate most of his paint. He sometimes paints his wife Phyllis, a former champion equestrian.

Wyeth’s art has appeared on one cover of The Saturday Evening Post.