Howard Wyeth - Family

Family

Wyeth was born in Jersey City, New Jersey. His mother Caroline Pyle was interested in the Wyeth family, flirted with some of them, and married Nathaniel C. Wyeth.

He had four brothers, John, David, N. Convers, and Andrew, and one sister, Caroline who died very young. A fifth brother, Newell died with his grandfather when their car stalled on a railroad crossing near their home and they were struck by a milk train.

Wyeth married once, to Rona Morrow, and later divorced. Catherine Wheeler was his partner for seventeen years, from his mid-thirties on.

The Wyeths are a family of visual artists and, earlier, illustrators who lived and worked together in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Including the Hurds and the McCoys, at least eleven artists are among the family and in-laws. Wyeth was the namesake of his great-uncle Howard Pyle (1853–1911), the artist and illustrator for Harper's Weekly and the author of The Merry Adventures of Robin Hood and four volumes of children's stories about King Arthur. His grandfather N. C. Wyeth was a student of Howard Pyle and a prominent illustrator of children's books for Charles Scribner's Sons. His grandmother Ellen Bernard Thompson Pyle was an illustrator of children for The Saturday Evening Post who married Walter Pyle, Howard's younger brother. He was the nephew of the painters Andrew Wyeth, Henriette Wyeth and Carolyn Wyeth.