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Washingtonians love art. Not just folks from the Skagit Valley or Bellingham and not just paintings capturing mystic light. It is too late now if you have not seen the Andrew Wyeth retrospective that closed Monday at the Seattle Art Museum. Celebrating his 100th birthday – he was born the same date as Henry Thoreau – the 110 paintings and drawings being displayed were crowded with people circling around them as if they were rock stars.

These were mostly locals on this January, Friday morning low-tourist-season day. I was amazed and gladdened. It recalled my Christmas week visit to Spanish museums in Madrid in 2004. Those galleries were jammed with citizens, proud and knowledgeable of their country’s artistic heritage and talents.

Wyeth, a Pennsylvanian easterner, generates that same cultural pride and bragging claims to great American artist. There were plenty of similarities to Richard Gilkey and other northwest painters, with muted greens and browns dominating, an occasional slough, lots of hills – though no mountains, some boats and ocean shorelines – including a heron’s tracks in the sand. I am no art critic, but in categorizing Wyeth’s landscapes, rural scenes and portraits, it seems to me he occupies a school of his own.

While he limited his palette to greens and browns, primarily, there was plenty of sky, but nary any bright blue. The only sunlight I recall reflected off the tips of the 13 year old Siri’s hair, at her shoulders, in an indoor portrait. The sun shines back east, but not in Andrew Wyeth’s world.

Wyeth had an inner light, as well as life. The most interesting painting for me was his 1989 “Snow Hill:” an allegory honoring another enigmatic master, film director Ingmar Bergman. His 1957 “Seventh Seal” ended with an iconic scene of Death leading the film’s cast along a hilltop. “Snow Hill’s” complexity starts with the title: Herman Melville, in “Moby Dick,” writes at the first siting: ‘There she blows! – there she blows! A hump like a snow-hill! It is Moby Dick!’

Wyeth, freeing himself from 40 years of specific, great paintings, places a maypole at the top of his archetypal Pennsylvania hill and has the Kuerners, the German couple who owned the farm; HelgaTestorf, whom he painted nude, in a green overcoat; John Loper, from the nearby community of Little Africa; and Allan Lynch, the boy running down Kuerner Hill in a 1947 painting that followed Wyeth’s father’s death and the hill itself, which symbolized Wyeth’s father. The snow scene makes this, probably not ironically, his brightest, lightest painting. The characters’ coats provide more variety of color than in most of his works.

I am glad I live in a town where so many art lovers and practitioners will have seen the Wyeth retrospective and will, potentially, have more to say, including helping me expand my limited knowledge of fine arts painting.