LEWISTON — Victoria Wyeth crouched before a group of Auburn Middle School students Tuesday and shared behind-the-scenes stories of her grandfather, artist Andrew Wyeth.

Hanging behind her was the original painting of “Master Bedroom,” a dog sleeping on a bed.

“When my grandfather painted it, no one in the family thought it was that special,” Wyeth said. “Now, this is one of his most famous pictures.”

That illustrates the importance of believing in yourself, she coached. “For the most part, your parents are probably right, but sometimes they’re not. You really have to believe in yourself even when your family doesn’t.”

“Master Bedroom” and other Wyeth works are on display at Bates College Museum of Art through Sunday, Oct. 2. The exhibit belongs to Victoria Browning Wyeth, the only grandchild of Andrew Wyeth, who died in 2009 at age 91.

She brought the exhibit to Bates and is giving a series of talks “because I love my grandfather very much,” she said. “I love kids.” Many children don’t have a chance to go to art museums, so she brought the museum to them.

Wyeth told the children that said she and her grandfather were close. “Grandparents have a special relationship with grandkids,” she said.

She talked about Andrew Wyeth’s likes, why he did what he did, and his techniques.

“This is a watercolor,” she said of “Master Bedroom.”

“One of the things he likes to do with watercolor is use negative space,” she said, calling attention to the light on the bedspread (a Bates bedspread), cast from a window. “He paints the whole picture around that light.”

Her grandfather used to complain that when you get a dog, it takes over the house, Wyeth said. “That’s why this painting is called ‘Master Bedroom,’ because the dog is like the master of the house.”

Andrew Wyeth led an unusual life, she said. He hung out in Pennsylvania and Maine. He didn’t go out much. “He just painted,” his granddaughter said.

At age 6½ he dropped out of school to paint and study with his father, N.C. Wyeth. “You can’t do that today,” she said.

At 31, he painted “Christina’s World,” among the best-known American paintings. It hangs in the New York Museum of Modern Art.

“He sold it for $1,500,” Victoria Wyeth said. “Now that painting is worth over $15 million.”

Standing in front of a self-portrait of her grandfather — her favorite in the exhibit — Wyeth asked the students if they could tell how old he was. “What happens to your ears when you get old?” she asked.

Ears get bigger, students answered.

“Exactly,” Wyeth said. “My grandfather had these big ears.” The portrait shows his wrinkly face and white hair. When she hugged him, his hearing aid beeped, she recalled with a smile.

“My grandfather taught me a valuable lesson, that there are a lot of boring people out there,” she said. “The more unusual the people you hang out with, the more fun you’re going to have.”

He liked to paint unusual people, she said. One of his friends was a mentally ill man who had 16 cats, wore watches up his arm and sometimes saw things that weren’t there. Wyeth painted him for 58 years. She asked him once how he could paint the same thing for so long. He told her that was the test, to look at the same thing or person and find different ways of painting.

As Victoria graduated from high school and went to Bates College, her parents divorced. “My grandfather knew how bummed out I was,” she said. “He’d send me these letters when I was at school.”

The exhibit includes one of her favorite letters, dated Oct. 26, 2001. It features a drawing of a witch. Andrew Wyeth wrote: “Vic dearest. This is the time where at midnight they all come back. From Old Bones.”

“You can see a sense of humor there,” she said. “In my family, Halloween was really, really important.”

She shared another story about the time her grandfather asked a friend to pose on his motorcycle on a road. “A woman pulls up and says on her cell phone, ‘I thought I’d seen everything. There’s one old fart painting another old fart on the side of the road.”

Andrew Wyeth called the painting “Stop.”

As a girl watching her grandfather sketch and paint, she tried not to let him think he was better than others, she said, but she was in awe of his work.

“I miss him more than anything,” Wyeth said. “I’d give up all these paintings just to hang out with him for one hour.”

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