James Browning Wyeth was born on July 6, 1946, in Wilmington, Delaware, just south of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he grew up and still lives part of each year. Jamie Wyeth has since adolescence attracted considerable attention as a third-generation American artist: son of Andrew Wyeth, among the country's most popular painters, and the grandson of Newell Convers Wyeth, famous for his distinctive illustrations for the classic novels by Stevenson, Cooper, and Scott.
Since 1969 Wyeth has served as a member of the advisory committee of the United States Postal Service. He designed one of the 1971 eight-cent Christmas stamps depicting the partridge in a pear tree of the English carol "The Twelve Days of Christmas." Wyeth was commissioned by President and Mrs. Ronald Reagan to produce the official White House Christmas cards for 1981 and 1984. In 1994 the U.S. Mint commissioned Wyeth to produce a portrait of Eunice Kennedy Shriver for use on the 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games Commemorative Coin commemorating her works with the Special Olympics. He volunteered his time and talent for the coin effort. The 1995 Special Olympics World Summer Games Commemorative Coin was the U.S. Mint's largest selling coin in 1995. He also lent his support to lighthouse preservation efforts in Maine with his 1995 exhibition, Jamie Wyeth: Island Light and the unveiling of a limited, signed and numbered edition of Iris at Sea.
Wyeth has illustrated two children's books; the first, in 1979, The Stray, written by his mother, Betsy James Wyeth, and published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux, and Cabbages and Kings, written by Elizabeth Seabrook, published June 1997 by Viking Children's Books, Penguin Putnam Inc. In June 1997, The Terra Museum of American Art's exhibition, N.C. Wyeth and His Grandson: A Legacy, exhibited his illustrations along with his grandfather's. In 1972, Wyeth was appointed a council member of the National Endowment for the Arts. In 1975, he became a member of the board of governors of the National Space Institute.
Wyeth holds honorary degrees from Elizabethtown College, 1975, Elizabethtown, PA, Dickinson School of Law, 1983, Dickinson College, Carlisle, PA, Pine Manor College, 1987, Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, University of Vermont, 1988, Burlington, Vermont and Westbrook College, Portland, Maine, 1993. Wyeth is a participating lender for the United States Department of State, Art in Embassies Program.
