The Kuerner Farm, also known as Ring Farm, is an historic farm which is located in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. It is notable for its association with artist Andrew Wyeth, who created about one-third of his work, more than 1,000 paintings and drawings, on subjects he found there during a span of seventy-seven years.
The Battle of Brandywine, fought nearby on September 11, 1777, left a cannonball and grapeshot in the farm's fields. Continental troops and militia units marched past on Ring road, but no actual fighting on the property can be documented. Brandywine Battlefield State Park is about a half-mile north of the farm. Caleb Ring built the farmhouse sometime around 1814. A third story was added circa 1850.[2]
Illustrator Howard Pyle taught art students, including Andrew Wyeth's father N. C. Wyeth, at Turner's Mill on US 1, just north of the farm, during the summers from 1898 to 1903.
Kuerner farmhouse
In 1926, Karl Kuerner and his wife Anna rented the farm, which they bought in 1940.[3] Karl had been a sheepherder near the Black Forest in his native Germany, and had been a machine gunner in the German Army during World War I, before moving to Philadelphia in 1926. Andrew Wyeth's first painting of the farm was completed in 1932, when Wyeth was just fifteen years old.[3]
In 1945, N. C. Wyeth, and Andrew Nyeth's three-year-old nephew, Newell Convers Wyeth II (b. 1941) were killed when their car, stalled at the railroad crossing near the northwest corner of the farm, was struck by a train.[4]
Andrew Wyeth met Helga Testorf in 1971 while she was nursing Karl Kuerner at the farm. A German immigrant, she lived across Ring Road from the farm with her husband. She soon began secretly modeling for Wyeth in a famous series of paintings and drawings. That year the first nude painting in the series was painted in the sewing room in the farm house. The works, numbering more than 240, remained secret until 1987, when they were exhibited at the National Gallery of Art.
Karl Kuerner died in 1979, followed by Anna in 1997. In 1999, the farm was acquired by the Brandywine Conservancy, which offers tours of the farm through its Brandywine River Museum.[3]
It was here also that Wyeth created many of The Helga Pictures, a series of more than 200 works all involving the model Helga Testorf, whom he met while she worked as a nurse caring for the farm's owner, Karl Kuerner.
