By VICTOR GRETO
CHADDS FORD, Pa. — He knows he’ll never get it right.
No matter how meticulously George Alexis “Frolic” Weymouth applies layers of paint to depict a stalk of grass, twist of weed, or the character of a friend — at the center remains a mystery, as ungraspable as the well of emotional energy that keeps his hands and eyes moving.
He calls it the curse of the realist.
“I don’t like looking at my work,” says Weymouth, 71. “It shows my limitations.”
Yet, sitting in the living room of his centuries-old home out at the Big Bend of the Brandywine River, a mighty stone’s throw from the Brandywine River Museum that he founded 35 years ago, Weymouth is surrounded by five of those “limitations.”
Behind him hangs the closest thing to a self-portrait he’s done, “The Way Back,” painted in 1963.
“I don’t understand people who do self-portraits,” he says. “People always want to ‘find themselves.’ If I found myself, I’d throw up. Why is the self such a damn good thing to find?
“See that picture?” he says, waving at “The Way Back.”
Sure.
It shows his hands holding the reins of a horse pulling a carriage, as they approach home. Everything he loves is contained in the picture: the Brandywine Valley, a horse, a carriage, his home, and the hands that can’t keep themselves away from paint.
“A horse’s ass,” he says, and laughs.
That, too.
For the quiet, self-deprecating inheritor of the tradition of the Brandywine School of painters — who built a museum to showcase the work that began with Howard Pyle more than a century ago, and continued spectacularly through three generations of the Wyeth family, from N.C. to Andrew to Jamie — it’s been a noisy year of awards.
The Greenville native recently received Winterthur’s Henry Francis du Pont Award for his “lifelong dedication to preserving the beauty, history, and unique heritage of the Brandywine Valley.”
In May, Weymouth received an honorary doctorate in humane letters from the University of Delaware.
Not bad for a dyslexic kid whose passions never had much to do with book-learning.
The thing is, the average person doesn’t seem to understand that Weymouth is as much a part of the artistic legacy of the Brandywine School as any of the more famous Wyeths.
His hidden reputation is partially his own doing, for better and for worse.
The Brandywine River Museum holds only four of his paintings, on the top floor, away from the iconic Andrew Wyeths. He says it would be too egocentric for him to display more of his own work in a museum he had founded.
But the meatier reason for his obscurity lies elsewhere.
“He’s successful in so many different fields,” says Joyce Hill Stoner, professor and consultant with the Winterthur-University of Delaware Program in Art Conservation. “He just saved 40,000 acres for the Brandywine battlefield. He’s an excellent egg tempera painter. He painted Prince Phillip’s portrait. He’s one of the best carriage drivers in the world. He knows the Royals. Each aspect of him is remarkable. Put them all together and it’s overwhelming.”
Unlike painters who do their work 24-7, acquire eccentric reputations, hold exhibits at museums in big cities and garner write-ups in large newspapers — Weymouth is happy painting when he’s inspired, driving one of his many carriages with guests and friends through a bucolic meandering path, raising money for his museum and conservancy, and walking through his garden with his dog Melanie.
On the wall to Weymouth’s right hangs his portrait of Luciano Pavarotti, fashioned in 1982. Off-center, wearing a light scarf and sporting a grim but determined gaze, the tenor dares the viewer to understand him.
Just like Weymouth’s aura of humility and sonorous mumble challenge anyone who inquires into that well-protected self of his.
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Frolic Weymouth sold his first two paintings when he was 6 years old.
It was done almost as a frolic. But that’s not how he got his name.
That came soon after he was born, from his mother’s frustration at getting Weymouth’s older brother Gene to stop whining about a lost dog.
Three-year-old Gene’s dog Frolic had gone missing, and he repeatedly asked mom, “Where’s Frolic?” to the point where she shoved the infant Weymouth in front of Gene’s face, and said, “Here’s your damn Frolic.”
The name stuck as hard and fast as egg tempera paint on panel.
Weymouth already had been painting for three years, when, at 6, he and his family visited a lady named Florence Shaw in Boca Grande, Fla. Using watercolors, the budding first-grader painted the large purple bougainvilleas in front of her home.
Shaw gave him 75 cents for it. Excited by the jingle in his pocket, he quickly painted a similar picture and sold it to Shaw for the same price.
Weymouth forgot all about the pictures until, 30 years later, he got a call from Sotheby’s auction house asking if he ever had painted a pair of bougainvillea pictures.
Never, he responded. But he soon recalled the incident, learning that Shaw’s descendants were trying to sell them. Sotheby’s sold them for $6,000.
“That’s how stupid the art market is,” he says, predictably self-deprecating.
The art market certainly can be erratic.
But that same art market has made greenback-magic out of the work of his older friend, Andrew Wyeth, 90, who for part of the year lives just up the river from Weymouth.
Andrew Wyeth’s iconic Americana paintings — including the lonely “Christina’s World” from 1948, of a young woman crawling in an open field toward a distant farm house, and the 240 Helga paintings he created between 1971 and 1985 — would be hard for any artist to compete with.
Both realists, Wyeth and Weymouth came of age during the middle of the 20th century, when abstract art ruled.
They knew each other, talked about each other’s work. Weymouth even had been married to Andrew Wyeth’s niece for 13 years.
The contrast, however, between the abstraction that ruled postwar American art and their own Brandywine school realism helped shape both artists’ work.
“He told me, in order to paint even a house, you have to go up to it, go inside,” Weymouth says of Wyeth. “The same with bodies. The same with landscapes. You’ve got to immerse yourself.”
To represent that immersion more meticulously, in the early 1960s, Wyeth suggested that Weymouth use egg tempera paint instead of oil.
Oil painting has been used in most fine art since the 17th century. But Weymouth discovered that when he used egg tempera — a process that uses egg yolk to bind pigments — it gave him a method to achieve a greater illusion of realism in his work.
Egg tempera allows the artist to layer and mingle coats of paint. In a sense, like some of the great late Medieval and High Renaissance masters before him who also used egg tempera, Weymouth attempts to build his subjects from the inside out.
The results, in both landscapes and portraits, are often stunning.
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“Frolic has not pushed himself forward as an artist, but he’s a serious one,” says Danielle Rice, director of the Delaware Art Museum.
Despite her art history background, Rice was unaware of Weymouth’s work before she lived in the area.
“If I hadn’t seen his work at the Philadelphia Museum of Art, or have come down to the Brandywine museum, I don’t know if he would have emerged in my consciousness,” she says.
In part, Stoner says, that’s because of the few exhibitions Weymouth has put on.
“One of the ways to rate a painter is to look at how many one-man shows he has,” Stoner says. “He’s respected, but he doesn’t paint every day. He doesn’t exhibit and get written up in critical reviews in the New York Times the way a 24-7 artist does.”
Weymouth, however, often may be seen walking sturdily along on his crutches — made necessary by years of riding horses and playing polo — with paint-spattered pants.
“Realistic painting was out of fashion from 1950 till 2000,” Stoner says. “Now the pendulum is swinging back, and I’m glad that Frolic and Andrew are alive to see it.”
His work, however, is different from the Wyeths, Rice says.
“You don’t look at it and say he’s an imitator,” she says. “He has a strong character of his own. It’s very lyrical.”
It’s a lyricism centered on a rural Greenville childhood dominated by riding and caring for horses, and painting picture after picture.
His mother, Deo du Pont, also was an artist, who gave it up after she began having children. “She never understood the idea of a being a Sunday painter,” he says.
Weymouth’s father was an investment banker.
Although as non-traditionally religious as they come, Weymouth attended Westown Quaker School, where mom told him not to forget to say thee and thou.
“We thought it meant ‘yes’ and ‘no,’” he says. “The Quakers went into hysterics about that.”
In helping express his own non-denominational spirituality, Weymouth much later designed and had built an outdoor, windowless stone and slate-roofed chapel on the Big Bend property.
At St. Mark’s High School, Weymouth latched on to a teacher named Kleber Hall, who encouraged his artistic realism and taught him anatomy.
The highlight of his college years at Yale, from where he graduated in 1958, included his association with Dean Keller, the only realist in a school of abstract art.
Weymouth also spent a great deal of his time going to the Yale medical school and anatomy classes so he could learn how to accurately draw the human body.
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Weymouth’s art, his life and his interests are ruled by the land, and all that contributes to the Brandywine Valley’s legacy and upkeep.
“His personal life is wrapped up in the conservancy,” Rice says.
Established in 1967 by Weymouth and friends who bought up a Chadds Ford meadow that was about to be developed, the Brandywine Conservancy now protects 40,000 acres in Delaware and Pennsylvania, mostly through conservation easements. These acres include portions of the Brandywine battlefield, as well as Winterthur’s nearly 1,000 acres.
The conservancy just purchased about 100 acres at the center of Brandywine battlefield that nearly completes all of the land involved in that Revolutionary War battle.
In 1971, Weymouth purchased at auction an old grist mill for $150,000, and converted it into a museum after Andrew Wyeth promised to help start it up by giving the nascent institution several of his paintings.
The Brandywine River Museum has since gone through three major renovations and includes many examples of the most important work of the Brandywine River school of painting, from the blood-and-guts illustrations of N.C. Wyeth, to lesser but key local artists, including Claymont illustrator F.O. Darley. It also includes fine work by N.C.’s teacher Howard Pyle, Winslow Homer and Frank Schoonover.
But the star of the museum is Andrew Wyeth, whose watercolors and oil paintings (and a few egg tempera works, such as “Indian Summer”) dominate.
Through his museum, the conservancy and his art, Weymouth has helped make the Brandywine River School of painting as worthy as any other American art movement, Stoner says.
“What’s unusual is that it’s rural,” she says of the school’s bucolic subject matter. “Everyone went to New York or Paris back then. To stick it out by a river and still get famous is pretty remarkable.”
That seems to be the fate of the Wyeths, anyway.
But for Weymouth, spending his days out at the Big Bend, walking among his colorfully elaborate gardens, painting almost every day in his upstairs studio, frolicking with his dog Melanie — it’s part of an ongoing struggle with reflecting and preserving nature.
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The “curse of the realist,” is that the artist inevitably fails before his subject, Weymouth says.
It’s how Weymouth understands Wyeth’s 240 Helga paintings: it’s the artist trying to get it right. Impossibly so.
For more than 15 years, “Nobody could look at them,” he says of Wyeth’s Helga work. “It was the joy of having no critic see them. It’s total freedom.”
And a rich reflection of artistic frustration.
Even so, Weymouth’s landscape painting, “August,” on display at the Brandywine River Museum, as well as 1964’s “Gathering Storm,” a portrait of a woman, are triumphs in the field of landscape and portrait painting.
“I don’t just make copies,” Weymouth says. “There’s the emotion, too.”
An emotion that brings out the character of many of his portrait subjects, both black and white, from Eugene E. du Pont and Pavarotti, to art patron and heiress Joan Whitney Payson, and the unnamed man in “Eleven O’Clock News,” also hanging at the museum.
Not to mention the portrait he painted of Queen Elizabeth’s husband Prince Phillip in 1995, that hangs now in Windsor Castle.
When asked about the nature of his legacy, it seems predictable that Weymouth looks extremely puzzled.
“Never thought about it,” he says. “You don’t choose to paint.
“You paint because you must.”