''Public Sale'' is a 1943 painting by the American artist

Andrew Wyeth Andrew Newell Wyeth ( ; July 12, 1917 – January 16, 2009) was an American visual artist, primarily a realist painter, working predominantly in a regionalist style. He was one of the best-known U.S. artists of the middle 20th century. In his ...

. It shows two men by a car and in the distance a crowd of people outside a farm building. The event depicted is the forced auction of a farm after the farmer's wife had died. The painting belongs to the

Philadelphia Museum of Art The Philadelphia Museum of Art (PMoA) is an art museum originally chartered in 1876 for the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia. The main museum building was completed in 1928 on Fairmount, a hill located at the northwest end of the Benjamin Fr ...

since 2000. As of 2016, it is currently not on view.

Reception

Ken Johnson of ''

The New York Times ''The New York Times'' (''the Times'', ''NYT'', or the Gray Lady) is a daily newspaper based in New York City with a worldwide readership reported in 2020 to comprise a declining 840,000 paid print subscribers, and a growing 6 million paid ...

'' singled the painting out as unusual in Wyeth's oeuvre because it "evinces social consciousness", something that otherwise is absent from the artist's works and makes him different from his contemporary

Norman Rockwell Norman Percevel Rockwell (February 3, 1894 – November 8, 1978) was an American painter and illustrator. His works have a broad popular appeal in the United States for their reflection of Culture of the United States, the country's culture. Roc ...

. Johnson, reviewing a Wyeth exhibition in 2006, likened ''Public Sale'' to "an understated Thomas Hart Benton painting".

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Public Sale 1943 paintings Paintings by Andrew Wyeth Paintings in the Philadelphia Museum of Art Farming in art