About the Painting Andrew Wyeth’s 1941 tempera painting Pennsylvania Landscape seeks to discover the feeling of history present in the land itself. Wyeth depicts the eighteenth-century Gideon Gilpin House, a part of the Brandywine Battlefield, visible between the branches of a massive buttonwood or sycamore tree, which has itself become entangled in history. Now known as the "Lafayette Sycamore," the 400-year-old sentinel still stands today. Pictorially, Wyeth used the buttonwood tree to dominate the composition, pulling the viewer’s eye through the picture with the varied angles and lines of its branches. He said, "I think of it as the whole Pennsylvania landscape in one picture - with that marvelous buttonwood tree in the middle. …I’m almost suspended, looking down. Of course it’s a compo">