Vintage Andrew Wyeth Burning Off Framed Folio Lithograph, c. 1962

The Piece

A dark barn interior, and one bright rectangle of open doorway looking out onto a field.

The right half of the sheet is the inside of the building — rough board and plaster, deep green-black, with a horse collar and long leather traces hanging from a peg. The left half is the opening: pale sky, a low band of scrub and grass, and a haze lying over the field. That haze is the title. Burning off is what you do to a field before you work it, and Wyeth painted the moment from inside the barn looking out at it.

The tonal range is the point. Almost the entire composition is a narrow band of grey-green and near-black, and then one hard-edged panel of light. It is a picture about a doorway, and about standing in the dark looking at the day.

This is a colour offset lithograph of the original drybrush watercolour, printed on heavy textured wove paper. The caption is printed on the sheet beneath the image: BURNING OFF, DRY BRUSH, 23 × 29″, 1961. COLLECTION OF MR. AND MRS. NORMAN WOOLWORTH.

Wyeth's signature appears at the lower right of the image. It is reproduced from the original painting as part of the printed image, not signed by hand.

The sheet is framed with its own wide printed margin serving as the mat, behind glass, in a stained wood moulding with a black inner band and a gilt fillet at the sight edge.

History & Provenance

The caption line is what identifies this sheet, and it identifies it precisely.

Printing the original's medium, its dimensions, its year and the name of the family who then owned it is not how a poster is captioned. It is how a portfolio plate is captioned. This sheet comes from The Four Seasons: Paintings and Drawings by Andrew Wyeth, published by Art in America Company, Inc., New York, in 1962, with a text by Lloyd Goodrich, then director of the Whitney Museum of American Art.

The folio ran to twelve plates, and the selection was made by the Wyeths themselves. Andrew and Betsy chose the works from their own house and studio at Chadds Ford and from the collections of friends, arranged around the cycle of the seasons. Burning Off is one of the twelve. Its companions are Canvasbacks, New Leaves, Early October, May Day, Quaker Ladies, Spring Sun, Storing Up, Brinton's Mill, Teel's Island, The Corner and The Berry Picker.

The publication date fixes this sheet at 1962. The painting behind it is dated 1961, which is the year printed in the caption and the year of the drybrush, not of the print.

Drybrush is the technique Wyeth is most closely identified with, and the one that makes him difficult to reproduce. He squeezed nearly all the water out of the brush and dragged what remained across the paper, laying down fine separated strokes rather than a wash. The result is dense, granular and built up in layers. It is slow work, and it is why his darks read as texture instead of flatness — visible here in the barn wall and in the boards behind the harness.

On what this is, stated plainly: it is a reproduction, not an original and not a hand-pulled artist's print. Under magnification the image breaks into a regular halftone dot screen across its whole area, which is the signature of photomechanical offset printing. The margin carries no pencil signature and no edition number. The Four Seasons was also issued in a signed, numbered limited edition; this sheet is from the trade folio.

That is the honest description, and it is also the reason a Wyeth of this quality is available at this price at all. The originals are in museums. This is the sheet the folio was made to put on a wall.

Product Details

Why It Belongs in Your Home

This picture does something most wall art cannot: it holds a room at low light.

Because the composition is nearly all dark with one panel of pale sky, it does not compete for attention in daylight and it does not disappear at night. The bright rectangle carries across a room. Hang it where a lamp rakes it rather than where the sun hits it and it reads all evening.

The palette is the easiest one there is to live with. Green-black, grey, bone and a single warm note in the field, in a stained frame with a worn gilt edge. It sits with wood, leather, iron, unpainted plaster and other dark frames without needing anything from them.

The subject is American and specific without being sentimental. A horse collar on a peg, a doorway, a field being burned off. It belongs in a study, a hallway, a stair wall, above a chest in a bedroom, or in a mudroom or entry where the tones of the room are already earth and iron.

At roughly sixteen by twenty inches it is a single-hang picture rather than a gallery-wall piece. It has enough presence to be the only thing on a narrow wall.

And the folio sheets are the sane way into Wyeth. The paintings themselves changed hands at prices that put them permanently out of reach, and the 1962 Art in America folio was produced specifically so that the work could be seen properly on paper at a reasonable size. Sixty-plus years on, the plates are increasingly framed and hung on their own, which is what has happened here.

A note on care. Keep it out of direct sun, which will pale the sheet before it touches the image. Wipe the glass with the cloth, never the spray, so nothing runs under the fillet and reaches the paper.

Leave the torn dust cover alone unless you are having the frame opened for other reasons. It is doing no harm, and a framer can lay in a fresh sheet in a few minutes if you want the back tidy.

If you ever have it reframed, ask for archival mounting and UV glazing. The sheet is sixty years old, printed on good paper, and it will outlast all of us if it is kept dry and out of the light.