The Last Person Made Famous By a Painting

For more than 15 years, Andrew Wyeth created 250 secret paintings. He hid them from everyone—including his wife, who was also his business manager—in the loft of a millhouse near his home in rural Pennsylvania. When they were discovered, in 1986, they generated a media frenzy that extended well outside the art world. The Helga paintings, as they came to be called, all depicted a single subject: Helga Testorf.