Buttonwood Farm

An outstanding example of Wyeth’s “easel paintings,” Buttonwood Farm represents a decidedly impressionistic approach to painting. Buttonwood Farm also records the looming historic Sycamore or Buttonwood tree (now nearly 350 years old) which dominates the hill yard next to “Lafayette’s Headquarters” on the site of the Brandywine Battlefield State Park near Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The home is actually the Gilpin-Painter House which served in the early twentieth century as a boarding house for artist Howard Pyle and his students, including N. C. Wyeth. This painting was exhibited in 1920 in the Annual Exhibition of the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, and a clipping from an unidentified Philadelphia newspaper describes the work as, "N. C. Wyeth eloquently reading the lesson of the later autumn silhouette in his Among the Buttonwoods."