Newell Convers Wyeth was born October 22, 1882, in Needham, Massachusetts. Growing up on a riverfront farm with 3 brothers next to his grandfather’s flower farm, he developed a deep love of plants, animals, and salt water boating. With a talent to draw horses, Wyeth applied to learn illustration from famed magazine and book icon, Howard Pyle, in Wilmington, Delaware. At age 20, October 1902, he stepped off the train there and life was never to be the same for him again. Pyle was an inspired teacher, and Wyeth was an attentive pupil who became a favorite of the master who emphasized the use of drama in painting, the importance of capturing the effect of light, and a personal knowledge of subject matter. Wyeth quickly pursued what he learned and embarked on a skyrocketing career as a provider of illustrations for books, national magazine stories and advertisement, and murals for major government and corporate buildings.

Early on, in 1906, Wyeth married Carolyn Brenneman Bockius of Wilmington. The couple’s honeymoon duplex brought the joy of children, and after moving to the Pyle summer school community of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, they built their home above an orchard on Rocky Hill in 191, using the proceeds from his illustrations for the Scribner children’s classic, Treasure Island by Robert Lewis Stevenson.

The rolling hills and sycamore trees of the Brandywine River Valley had a profound influence on Wyeth and his 5 children, but he longed to return to the farm in Needham, Massachusetts. In 1921 he bought his late grandfather’s home there and moved his whole family to Massachusetts. A year earlier he had purchased a modest fisherman's home in Port Clyde, Maine, with the help of his longtime friend and fellow Pyle student Sidney Marsh Chase of Haverhill, Massachusetts. The 7-member Wyeth family spent every summer in Maine, interrupted dramatically in October 1945 by his tragic death when he and his namesake grandson were crushed in their car by a passing train in Chadds Ford. The two N.C. Wyeths were buried together at nearby Birmingham Cemetery.

The Port Clyde home, tagged “Eight Bells,” is still held by the Wyeth family of descendants, with its art studio having been used after NC’s death by his daughter Carolyn Wyeth, his son Andrew Wyeth, and his grandson Jamie Wyeth. The Needham home went through several ownerships until purchased in 2018 by Linda Bean and placed in a foundation she created to preserve it as the world’s most complete N.C .Wyeth library — the collection of Douglas Allen, Jr. of Neshantic Station, New Jersey.

Andrew Newell Wyeth was born in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, on July 12, 1917, a son of the internationally renowned painter and illustrator N.C. Wyeth and his wife Carolyn Bockius Wyeth.

At age 15, Wyeth began his artistic training in his father's studio.

The Wyeth family spent summer months in Maine, and Andrew Wyeth's early watercolor landscapes, much influenced by the work of Winslow Homer met with enormous critical acclaim at his first one-man show at the William Macbeth Gallery in New York City in 1937. An exceedingly self-critical artist, this immediate success did not reassure him. Feeling that his work was too facile, he returned to his father's studio for further concentration on technique.

Wyeth soon began working in egg tempera, a renaissance technique introduced to him by his brother-in-law, the painter Peter Hurd. Tempera soon became his primary medium. He said that it forced him to slow down the execution of a painting and enabled him to achieve the superb textural effects that distinguish his work. Other mediums he used were watercolor and dry brush watercolor.

In 1940, Wyeth married Betsy James, whom he had met in Maine the previous summer. It was Betsy who introduced Wyeth to her long-time friend Christina Olson. Olson's character represented "old Maine" to him, and she became his model for many works of art, including his most famous work, Christina's World.

The third generation of the Wyeth family of painters, James Browning Wyeth committed himself to an artistic career by the age of 12. He chose to be tutored at home and to spend the afternoons in the studio of his Aunt Carolyn in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Carolyn, who was taught the basics of draftsmanship by her father, N. C., assigned her nephew to draw spheres and cubes for his first year of study. Although he found these lessons tedious, they became the foundation from which Jamie could find his own artistic voice. It was also in her studio that the young Wyeth first became attracted to the medium of oil paint. It was precisely the "juiciness" that Andrew disliked about the medium that attracted his son. Following one aborted attempt at painting in egg tempera, James chose oil as his primary medium, and continues to use it today.

Maine has been a strong influence on Wyeth's work and has been the subject of some of his most experimental and unique paintings. Although he spent summers in Maine with his parents and older brother Nicholas during his youth, it was after purchasing the house on Monhegan Island built by artist Rockwell Kent that Wyeth began spending significant time painting Maine’s people and places.