Henriette Wyeth, 89; Portrait Subjects Included Pat Nixon

Henriette Wyeth, daughter of American master N.C. Wyeth and a world-renowned painter in her own right, has died. She was 89.

Wyeth, the sister of artist Andrew Wyeth and widow of Peter Hurd, died Thursday in Roswell of complications from pneumonia.

As the eldest of five Wyeth children, she was a child prodigy, gaining fame for her portraiture when younger brother Andrew was just beginning to draw.

She moved to New Mexico in 1929 with Hurd and raised an artistic family of her own--all the while keeping up with her painting, including portraits of actresses Helen Hayes and Paulette Goddard, former First Lady Pat Nixon and her own family.

When Pat Nixon died in 1993, Hillary Rodham Clinton moved the portrait to a main corridor of the White House to honor her predecessor. Nixon, who had sat for the artist in San Clemente, disliked the painting because she said it made her look “too sad.”

Born Oct. 22, 1907, in Wilmington, Del., Henriette Wyeth began formal art lessons when she was 11, mostly charcoal studies of spheres and pyramids skewed by shadows and light.

Polio left her with a gnarled right hand, so she drew with her left hand and painted with her right.

She decided when she was about 12 to pursue art seriously, studying in Philadelphia, and began to earn renown as a portraitist by age 16.

Her move to New Mexico had been against her father’s wishes.

“He felt I should not let marriage interfere with my painting,” she said in a 1989 interview with Associated Press.

But she continued to paint until health problems forced a halt a few years ago. Besides portraits, there were still lifes, floral landscapes and her ethereal “Death and the Child.”

She was an outspoken critic of television and feminism and felt that children had been “blunted” by modern society. She stopped doing children’s portraits, she said, “because today’s children--they are so deadpan.”

Major exhibits of her work were mounted at the Carnegie Institute in Pittsburgh, the Art Institute in Chicago, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Roswell Museum of Art in New Mexico.

She and her husband had three children, Peter Jr., Michael and Carol Rogers, the latter two becoming artists. Her husband died in 1984.