Dr. Michael Prediger and John Touhey have accumulated an impressive art collection over the last 50 years. Their private collection contains about 30 works of art by the McCoy family as well as other reputable American artists.
In 1969, after graduate school, John moved to Chadds Ford to take a job as a reading specialist at Delaware County College. John's home was across the road from Andrew and Betsy Wyeth, Anna B's uncle and aunt. John met her soon after moving there and they've been friends ever since. Since it is now so well known, John thinks its lovely to remember how they were all young and very ambitious to support Anna B, her husband and a few close friends in the development of the Brandywine Conservancy, which is the parent organization to the now renowned Brandywine Museum.
Michael and John have lived in Bucks County for 38 years, 16 years in Lumberville and Tinicum, and 22 years in Solebury in their home that is now for sale. One of their recent acquisitions is by the French artist, Charles Clair (1860-1930) purchased during their trip to Paris in 2018. Touhey said, “We never purchased a picture for profit; rather what the picture spoke about to us. We, therefore, have a collection that we can wander through every day and recall the moment of acquisition or the circumstances that brought the picture to us.”
Ann Wyeth McCoy was the youngest daughter of N.C. Wyeth. While she studied art under her father, her first love was music. In 1934, one of her compositions was played by the Philadelphia Orchestra, Leopold Stakowski conducting. The subjects of her paintings include the world around her and moments in time. John W. McCoy ll studied under N.C. Wyeth and married Ann in 1935. His artistic career was life long including teaching at the Philadelphia Academy of the Fine Arts. From 1946-1961. His work embraced abstraction, realism, modernism and tradition. His extensive body of work is held by many museums including the Bogg Museum of American Art in Dover, Delaware, The Brandywine River Museum in Chadds Ford, and the Farnsworth Museum in Rockland, Maine. Ann Brelsford McCoy, known as Anna B to her family and friends, studied under her aunt Carolyn Wyeth, the oldest daughter of N.C. Wyeth, and Charles Vinson. Her life was surrounded and influenced by her grandfather, N.C. Wyeth, her father and mother, her uncle Andrew Wyeth and her cousin Jamie Wyeth. She graduated in 1960 with a Bachelor Arts degree from Bennett College and married Frolic Weymouth in 1961. Together with a few other concerned environmentalists, they started the Brandywine Conservancy which gave birth to the Brandywine River Museum. Following her divorce in 1979, she returned to painting and is today a highly respected portrait artist as well as landscapes and still lifes.