The Cloisters

Andrew Wyeth often sought to capture his emotional response to an intriguing place by honing, refining, and crystallizing his initial impressions into hushed, haunting final compositions. The Cloisters depicts a small, empty room at the Ephrata Cloister, located near Lancaster, Pennsylvania, about 50 miles from Wyeth’s home in Chadds Ford. It was the seat of the German Seventh-day Baptists, an early American religious colony that had disbanded in 1934 and was being restored as a historic landmark when Wyeth visited with his aunt Elizabeth in 1949. Wyeth’s early studies portrayed Elizabeth in the room, but he eliminated her figure and increasingly abstracted the space to focus on the play of light against the muted brown walls. The bird, a chalk sculpture of the type produced by residents of the Ephrata Cloister, stands as a slightly surreal evocation of the history of the colony and Elizabeth’s one-time presence in the scene.