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What makes Andrew Wyeth’s paintings of farmhouses and rustic furniture so engrossing? A new exhibition at the Brandywine Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, shows that part of his secret sauce was his wife, Betsy.

“Andrew Wyeth is one of the best loved artists in American art,” curator William Coleman said. “Until now, only insiders have understood how fundamental Betsy Wyeth was to defining what an Andrew Wyeth painting looks like.”

“By Design: The Worlds of Betsy James Wyeth” is both a gallery exhibition inside the Brandywine and a rare chance to visit one of her masterpieces: the Brinton’s Mill complex, a collection of 18th century buildings she acquired and rebuilt. The mill was the Wyeths’ home for decades and the inspiration for many of Andrew’s paintings, including “Raccoon” and “Swifts.”

As a privately owned property, Brinton’s Mill has never been open to visitors except for personal guests of the Wyeths when they were alive. Andrew died in 2009, and Betsy in 2020. During the four-month run of “By Design” the museum is offering guided tours of Brinton’s Mill for small groups and occasional workshop events.

Coleman does not use the word “restored” to describe the work Betsy did to the historic stone buildings and their grounds. Instead, he describes her vision as “holistic,” applying a creative invention to shape land and buildings into a rustic nostalgia for something that had never existed.

“She sets about making this carefully crafted example of what we call Yankee minimalism,” Coleman said. “This subtle mix of mid-century modern taste and colors with collected antiques and gestures to the history of this region. She makes this fascinating composite all her own, that then calls out to be painted.”

Coleman said Betsy designed interiors, exteriors and landscapes with an eye to how they might translate to Andrew’s canvases. In some of his celebrated paintings, like the dozing dog of “Night Sleeper” and the eerie chimney birds of “Swifts,” Andrew responded to Betsy’s invented environments with his own artistic invention.

A visit to Brinton’s Mill proves that the views outside the window of “Night Sleeper,” for example, are not faithful to reality. The stark white room with fireplace in the painting “Sparks” exemplifies Betsy’s aesthetic of blending a clean modernism with antique wood and wrought iron accents.

“She helps Andrew Wyeth find this way to be both realist and modern,” Coleman said. “This way of painting recognizable subjects but suffusing them with this uncanny, surrealistic, otherworldly quality.”

The Wyeths’ creative partnership was so intertwined that their son, painter Jamie Wyeth, is quoted in the exhibition as saying Betsy “could have co-signed the paintings.”

“It’s like I’m a director and I had the greatest actor in the world,” Betsy told author Richard Meryman in his 1996 book, “Andrew Wyeth: A Secret Life.” “So, my role is unimportant. It’s the most elegant, wonderful position in the world to be in. I had these strange viewpoints, and he would right away catch on.”

Andrew, in turn, called his wife a “genius.”

“She made me into a painter that I would not have been otherwise,” Andrew is quoted as saying in “A Secret Life.”

While “By Design” focuses on Betsy’s visions in architecture, landscapes, interiors and even jewelry, Coleman said her management of Andrew’s artistic career did not stop there. Andrew was known to be an introvert and hypersensitive to criticism, leaving Betsy the task of making sure the world knew about his internal life.

“She’s also advising on his paintings, overseeing how they meet the art market, placing titles on them, reproducing them, making books about them. It goes on and on,” Coleman said. “She was a fascinating woman, born in a time where she could not be the star, but she channels all of her brilliance into managing her artist and has very clear ideas about the path his art should take.”

One of the reasons so many of Wyeth’s paintings show Chadds Ford as a stark and wintry landscape is because that is chiefly how Andrew and Betsy experienced it. The Wyeths typically spent winters at Brinton’s Mill, and the other half of the year in Maine, where Betsy also created structures and vistas designed to capture the imagination of her husband.

“By Design” is a three-part exhibition, at the Brandywine Museum, the Farnworth Museum in Rockland, Maine, and Colby College of Waterville, Maine. Each museum features paintings depicting the other locations and, like the Brandywine’s access to Brinton’s Mill, The Farnsworth and Colby museums offer patrons a rare chance to visit the Wyeth’s Maine homes, where the couple’s creative partnership thrived.

The Farnsworth Museum offers access to the Olson House, famous as the site of Andrew’s painting “Christina’s World.” During the run of the exhibition, Colby College is offering excursions to Allen and Benner Islands, which Betsy also transformed.

For a June 2009 article in Architectural Digest, novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux visited Betsy at Allen and Benner to watch her work.

“She moves quickly, taking long strides, and at the age of 81 is an occasional but enthusiastic smoker,” Theroux wrote. “In a joshing, slightly headmistress manner she gives brisk, precise orders.”

Other Wyeth properties in Maine – Betsy’s ancestral home at Broad Cove Farm and Southern Island, which Betsy acquired as her first large-scale landscape project – remain off-limits to visitors. The Brandywine Museum created an immersive video installation in its gallery to experience those places.

“By Design: The Worlds of Betsey James Wyeth” will be on view until Jan. 10. As of the opening of the exhibition, the weekly excursions to Brinton’s Mill have already sold out, but the Brandywine Museum will be planning additional trips to the property for activities such as plein air painting and birdwatching.