Andrew Wyeth, America's “painter of the people”, famous for his melancholic landscapes of Pennsylvania and Maine, has died at the age of 91.

He died in his sleep in his home town of Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, surrounded by family and friends, after a brief illness.

The artist was perhaps best known for Christina's World (1948), a landscape painted, like many of his other works, in egg tempera, a classically inspired technique that the artist said forced him to slow down the execution of his works.

Christina's World features a paralysed woman (a neighbour of Wyeth's) looking up a grassy hill towards a farm. Her face is unseen. It was another of Wyeth's neighbours in Chadds Ford, the German-born Helga Testorf, who became the subject of a series of intimate portraits that earned him millions of dollars and a surge of public attention in 1986. The “Helga” paintings, many of them full-figure nudes, were accompanied by a minor scandal: Wyeth had not told his wife, Betsy James, about the more than 200 paintings and sketches until he had completed them.

Wyeth was part of a large creative family that included his father, N.C. Wyeth, the painter and illustrator, and his son Jamie Wyeth.Wyeth began training in his father's studio at the age of 15, and he drew inspiration from the landscape around Chadds Ford. The Brandywine River Museum, a converted 19th-century grist mill in the town, includes hundreds of works by the Wyeth family. “The world has lost one of the greatest artists of all time,” said George Weymouth, Brandywine's chairman.

Until the last years of his life, Wyeth's work continued to influence US popular culture. In 2004, the film-maker M. Night Shyamalan based a movie, The Village, on Wyeth's paintings.

Wyeth also achieved international recognition during his career. He was the first American artist since John Singer Sargent to be inducted into the French Academy of Fine Arts, and the first living American artist to have an exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts in London.Although he amassed great wealth, acclaim and popularity, Wyeth was stung by critics who described him as an illustrator rather than a true artist.

“He was a man of extraordinary perception, and that perception was found in his thousands of images, many of them iconic,” said Jim Duff, a director of the Brandywine museum.

“He highly valued the natural world, the historical objects of this world as they exist in the present and strong-willed people.”

In a Life magazine interview in 1965, Wyueth said: “Really, I think one's art goes only as far and as deep as your love goes.”

Described by some as a secretive man who would spend hours hiking through the countryside alone, he painted many portraits, working several times with favorite subjects, but said he disliked having someone else watching him paint. He described his themes as “thoughtful” rather than melancholy.

“I do an awful lot of thinking and dreaming about things in the past and the future, the timelessness of the rocks and the hills, all the people who have existed there,” he once said.

“I prefer winter and [autumn], when you feel the bone structure in the landscape, the loneliness of it, the dead feeling. Something waits beneath it, the whole story doesn't show. I think anything like that-which is contemplative, silent, shows a person alone-people always feel is sad. Is it because we've lost the art of being alone?”

Wyeth is survived by his wife and two sons.

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