As I moved through the galleries, I asked myself if Wyeth appears to prefer buildings and landscapes to people because he is better at painting them—or is he better at painting them because he simply likes them more? Doors, windows, pitched roofs, pails, dishes, tables, chairs, boots and empty clothing are more fluid and alive than the static or absent individuals who possess them.

Of course, in his vast career Wyeth (b. 1917) has painted plenty of portraits. Some are exceptional. "Why, she's pretty!" one viewer gasped before Maga's Daughter, the 1966 portrait of Wyeth's wife, Betsy. She is. Wyeth deftly conveys her charm in a quaint, flat bonnet with narrow ribbons. But it seems to be a stately, composed charm, a gracious quietude—not the mercurial smiling playfulness we find in photographs of Betsy in the excellent exhibition catalogue.

With heavy humor, Marriage (1993) depicts two old folks, Wyeth's neighbors, whom he apparently came upon with odd informality asleep in their bed. They are neither companionable nor hostile, but as comfortable together as travel-weary strangers waiting for a bus—not a streetcar named Desire; maybe a bus named Death.

Perhaps the Madame Tussaud rigidity of Wyeth's figures is a consequence of the painstaking egg tempera process. His watercolors, though dry-brushed and highly controlled, have more verve. Virgin Birch (1982), a shadowy, fern-shrouded tree trunk, is a dark, lush, almost turgid watercolor. Could another artist make poetry with such a mass of detail? OK, Dürer and a couple of others, but it's a rare accomplishment to organize so much into an organic whole.

There's no laborious allegory or metaphor here, but there is meaning in the artist's profound attentiveness, a complete sublimation of the intellect and analytic processes into pure perception, into being. It is the result of discipline and it has the power of the sublime. You couldn't ask for more in a painting.

Wyeth is generally presented as an isolated maverick whose only artistic influences were illustrators, in particular his father, N.C. Wyeth, and N.C.'s own teacher, Howard Pyle. Just outside the exhibition galleries, there's a splendid group of works suggesting Wyeth's relationship to other Modernist painters, from Edward Hopper, with whom he was acquainted, to Grant Wood to Georgia O'Keeffe to Marsden Hartley. Wyeth is a loner but he's certainly seen art.

Often a sense of abstract but barely contained euphoria buoys Wyeth's finest work, no matter how grim. The über-famous Christina's World isn't in the show, but other less familiar works are as impressive and more engaging because they haven't appeared as posters, coasters and parodies. Nevertheless, many are on the mediocre side. No one hits a home run every time.

Wyeth's best period is the late 1950s and '60s, when he found a nice balance between the struggle to represent and a soaring sense of symbolic possibility. In later works, his skills can seem mechanical and his subject matter, routine. Paintings of neighbor Helga Testorf secretly executed between 1970 and 1985, are a testament to Wyeth's feeling for surfaces (no double entendre intended). They are sensuous in a tasteful, bovine way. There's one portrait of Helga in this show, the best, Braids (1977). It's enough.

I prefer Spring Fed (1967) to anything of Helga. The trickle of water overflowing a granite basin—likened by Wyeth to the blood of his childhood hero Robin Hood dying on the nunnery floor—darkens the stone yet flashes with life, a contrast to the similarly dark but empty fissures in the stone.

On a wall above, a humble galvanized bucket is neatly balanced to drain. This object, for Wyeth analogous to Robin Hood's helmet, presents a cylindrical contrast to the rectilinear shapes organizing the whole surface, yet all the lines in the painting are subtly irregular, worn, modified by use. There's a sense of the particular resonance of echoes against cool, damp surfaces.

Light, as always in Wyeth, is vitality, goodness and unity. Through a pair of windows we see cattle, hills, buildings: a receding vista of activity clearly irrelevant to the mysteries of life and death embodied in this inner moment so satisfying and complete.

Andrew Wyeth: Memory and Magic

Through July 16, Philadelphia Museum of Art, 26th St. and the Parkway, 215-763-8100