Twenty-four artworks from the collection of late L.L. Bean heiress Linda L. Bean are slated to achieve $3 million amid Bonhams’s American Art auction on November 19. The trove that the Bean family is putting up for sale encompasses three generations of the Wyeth dynasty, and embodies Bean’s love for the Maine landscape, which the Wyeths habitually immortalized in their work.

Bean was born 1941 in Portland, Maine, 18 miles from Freeport, where her grandfather opened his beloved business in 1912. She remained a lifelong Mainer. In 1992, Bean encountered a book of Wyeth family patriarch N.C. Wyeth’s letters at an antiques show, igniting a fervent interest in the family that lasted until her death in March.

N.C. Wyeth, Self-portrait in Top Hat and Cape (ca. 1927). Image: Bonhams.

N.C. Wyeth was born 1882 in Needham, Massachusetts (Bean once owned his childhood home and tried turning it into a research library.) He left to attend the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware. Known as the “Father of American Illustration,” Pyle initiated the Brandywine School movement, which went on to include Wyeth and Norman Rockwell, whose 1940 painting A Scout Is Loyal (est. $3 million to $5 million) leads this month’s sale. Wyeth’s Self Portrait in Top Hat and Cape (ca. 1927), meanwhile, leads his family’s contributions, with an estimate of $400,000 to $600,000.

Wyeth and his wife had five children. Three became artists—Henriette, Carolyn, and, most famously, Andrew. Carolyn is absent from Bonhams’s sale, but Henriette’s oil on canvas portrait of her sister Ann Wyeth McCoy (est. $20,000–$30,000) appears, as well as three watercolors and one sketch by Andrew. Island Dawn (1941) leads his quartet, with an estimate of  $120,000–$180,000.

Henriette Wyeth, Ann Wyeth McCoy (undated). Image: Bonhams.

History remembers Ann as a musician, but she appears thrice, contributing two watercolors (each expected to fetch around $1,000), alongside Henriette’s portrait. Two works of watercolor and graphite by Ann’s husband John McCoy are expected to fetch $2,000 to $3,000, while another seagull still life could go for $700 to $1,000. Their daughter Ann Brelsford McCoy also has an undated oil painting, Sangria (est. $800 to $1,200), to add.

Three works by Andrew’s son Jamie Wyeth, age 77, who Bean worked with last year to help Port Clyde recover from a fire, round out the family reunion. Jamie’s 2019 portrait of Andy Warhol (est. $40,000 to $60,000) is an interesting outlier, but his more traditional oil painting Dead Cat Museum, Monhegan Island (1999) is expected to sell for $300,000 to $500,000.

Jamie Wyeth, a.w. Double A.W. Study / Heads and Hands (2019). Image: Bonhams.

N.C. Wyeth’s brood settled in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania and summered in Port Clyde, Maine, until his death in 1945. Both places feature heavily across the family’s art. Bean moved to Port Clyde in 2007, and opened up her own successful, then controversial, lobster enterprise—while owning and operating the village’s General Store and Dip Net Restaurant. Her businesses and philanthropic efforts were so numerous and renowned throughout Maine that she launched an (unsuccessful) bid to become a Republican senator. She was a trustee at Brandywine Conservancy and Museum of Art in Chadds Ford, too.

Bean’s two dozen works in this sale are but a portion of her collection. Works by four other artists not named Wyeths are also up for grabs and allude that her love for Maine exceeded all else.