''Trodden Weed'' is a 1951 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 is a self-portrait, displaying the painter from his knees down, dressed in a pair of old, high leather boots. The boots had belonged to N. C. Wyeth's teacher

Howard Pyle Howard Pyle (March 5, 1853 – November 9, 1911) was an American illustrator and author, primarily of books for young people. He was a native of Wilmington, Delaware, and he spent the last year of his life in Florence, Italy. In 1894, he began ...

. Andrew Wyeth had received the boots as a Christmas gift from his wife in 1950. The boots fitted him and he used them as he walked around the countryside of Chadds Ford recovering from a serious operation. Wyeth described the creation of this painting in a letter published in ''

ARTnews ''ARTnews'' is an American visual-arts magazine, based in New York City. It covers art from ancient to contemporary times. ARTnews is the oldest and most widely distributed art magazine in the world. It has a readership of 180,000 in 124 countr ...

'' in May 1952. Michael Ennis of ''

Texas Monthly ''Texas Monthly'' (stylized as ''TexasMonthly'') is a monthly American magazine headquartered in Downtown Austin, Texas. ''Texas Monthly'' was founded in 1973 by Michael R. Levy and has been published by Emmis Publishing, L.P. since 1998 and is ...

'' wrote in 1987: "In ''Trodden Weed'' (1951), a self-portrait from the knees down in which the artist donned Howard Pyle's wrinkled old boots, Andrew strides the coppery turf with an autobiographical symbolism that is as hackneyed as it is visually moribund".

References

Further reading