Kuerner’s Kingdom

A Brandywine artist reclaims his farm

By Terry Conway
Photography By Carlos Alejandro
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July 7, 2009
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The twisting country lane splits the old farm into two tracts. To the left lies a pasture sown with red clover and timothy, where a draft horse, a pony, and a pair of frisky goats graze contentedly. Nearby, a red wooden barn is just a short toss from an 18th-century farmhouse. Off to the right, the steep slope of Kuerner Hill rises against the horizon.

Andrew Wyeth discovered the Kuerner farm on one of his boyhood walks; he painted his first image of it in 1932, at the age of 15. But Kuerner Hill took on a new meaning in 1945 when Wyeth’s father, famed illustrator N.C. Wyeth, and cousin were killed within sight of that seemingly ordinary bump of earth. Their car was broadsided by a locomotive. In the painting Winter 1945 the hill became a symbolic portrait of his father, and the boy running aimlessly down it, himself.

The iconic artist revisited the knoll again in Snow Hill, one of the most haunting, beautiful, and resonant images of Wyeth’s seven-decade career. Atop the hillside we view the improbable scene of a Maypole dance at Christmas time.

In the world of Wyeth, Karl Kuerner III’s brush strokes have carved out his own mark.

These days the Kuerner farm just might be the most famous in America. It appears in nearly 1,000 of Wyeth’s works. Karl Kuerner, a German machine gunner during World War I, settled there in 1926, first as a hired hand and—after years of frugal living and hard work—as the owner in 1940.

Karl and his wife, Anna, are gone. Andy left us last January on a winter’s day familiar from many of his paintings: snowy, cold, and moody. Karl, Jr., 82, still pilots a tractor baling hay to stock in the towering barn. The old farm is one of the few agrarian operations remaining in Chadds Ford.

And the tall and fit Karl III, sporting close-cropped gray hair and rimless spectacles, acknowledges he is a fortunate fellow. This Kuerner grandson was blessed with the enviable experience of watching Wyeth at work. It was as natural an occurrence for young Karl as his chores of milking cows, mending fences, and hauling endless bales of hay.

“Andy had open reign of the farm and barn,” remembers Karl III, 52. “He had a key to the farmhouse—where he’d paint up on the third floor. It was just a regular part of our day-to-day life. My grandfather had known Andy from a young boy and watched him evolve. He would tell me, ‘leave him alone. Let him paint.’

“I was born into it, didn’t know anything else. You’re engulfed in this before you’re even aware.” It first struck him when visitors from France or Russia marveled that he was brought up “in the middle of all this.”

In the world of Wyeth, Karl III’s brush strokes have carved out his own mark. Karl began dabbling in art around age ten, doodling his own little world. His father gathered a batch of drawings and presented them to Andy’s sister, Carolyn. She responded: “send him over.”