Jaime Wyeth

James Browning Wyeth was born on July 6, 1946, in Wilmington, Delaware, and was raised in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. In 1966, he enlisted in the Delaware Air National Guard, serving until 1971. During this period, he received a commission from the Eyewitness to Space program run jointly by NASA and the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C., to record launch activities at Cape Kennedy. In 1967, he completed an official posthumous portrait of President John F. Kennedy, commissioned by the Kennedy family.

In 1968, Wyeth married Phyllis Mills, an equestrian and disability advocate. During the early 1970s, he split his time between Pennsylvania and New York City, working alongside Andy Warhol at The Factory to complete a mutual series of painted portraits and sketches. In 1972, he was appointed to the board of directors of the Brandywine River Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, and in 1975, he was appointed by President Gerald Ford to the board of trustees of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1976.

Wyeth participated as an official artist during the 1976 United States Senate Watergate hearings, producing courtroom drawings for regional and national press distribution. In 1987, he traveled to the Soviet Union as part of an official cultural exchange sponsored by the United States Information Agency, accompanying a touring exhibition alongside Soviet artist Tonya Shirokova. His paintings have been acquired into the permanent collections of major public institutions, including the National Gallery of Art, the Smithsonian American Art Museum, the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, and the Whitney Museum of American Art.