Andrew Wyeth, “Bird in the House”
Some years ago, a wren built a nest in a winter wreath we had attached to our front door. I felt downright hospitable allowing him to squat there, and it troubled me to see him fly off in fear whenever I opened the door.
I had a fond feeling for our little guest. Until the day I opened the door, and he flew into our house. He was frantic and left a trail of droppings wherever I tried to trap him in a towel. I was getting angrier by the minute as he continued to elude me.
I finally decided that the best thing to do would be, instead of trying to catch him, just wear him out. Which I did. But not without more droppings. When, exhausted, he allowed me to pick him up and let him go outside, he was relieved and so was I.
I disassembled his next.
But a bird in the house doesn’t have to be an irritation, as Andrew Wyeth demonstrated in his painting, “Bird in the House.”
Wyeth saw beauty in the most everyday objects, situations, and people. And he captured that beauty in ways that call us to pause and observe, not only his paintings but the beautiful and God-glorifying world all around us.
Andrew Wyeth (1917-2009) was not a Christian, but he did have a sense of spiritual things. He glimpsed in fishing nets, wafting in a breeze, the spirit of a drowned girl off the coast of Maine (“Pentecost”). Even a humble clothesline could launch Wyeth into a mood of transcendency (“Slight Breeze”). In “Winter 1946”, following the tragic death of his father N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth painted himself as a young boy running down a hillside, one arm flailing: “It was me, at a loss—that hand drifting in the air was my free soul, groping” (The Art of Andrew Wyeth, p. 58).
So I don’t think it farfetched to see spiritual insight in “Bird in the House.” The light in which the bird is cast comes down into the room from right to left, top to bottom—like a heavenly light. The bird’s wing and the evergreen branch, pointing into the light, gesture outward and upward. The combination of earth tones and patch of yellow light, together with the simple beauty of the composition, encourage the viewer, not only to delight in the whimsy of the scene but to wonder about the many elements of beauty, breaking into a home from beyond, that “Bird in the House” suggests.
“The world is charged with the grandeur of God” wrote Hopkins, and few artists have captured that grandeur as well as Andrew Wyeth. His art encourages us to pay more attention to the simple and everyday beauty all around us. For believers, such beauty can translate to God’s Presence, as He reveals Himself and speaks to us in the things He has made. Learning to appreciate such simple beauty can help us in setting the Lord always before us, in Whose Presence are fullness of joy and pleasures forevermore (Ps. 16.8, 11).
