Art: Close to Home

Andrew Wyeth, 31, is one of the narrowest of young U.S. artists—and one of the most widely respected. He is a portraitist who paints only his friends, and a landscapist who portrays only two localities. His new pictures, on exhibition in a Manhattan gallery last week, owed nothing to the prevailing distortions of Paris: they were in the straightforward, realistic U.S. tradition of Thomas Eakins, Winslow Homer and Edward Hopper. Bleak as a December dawn, they seemed a startling contrast to the cheerful, crop-headed young man who had painted them.

Up in the Attic. One, entitled Christina's World had...