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About
Wyeth was born in Needham, Massachusetts. He created over 3,000 paintings and illustrated some 112 books, in the course of his 50-year career. He is best known for his illustrations in Scribner's Magazine and publishing company. He worked as both a painter and an illustrator, understanding the difference, saying, "Painting and illustration cannot be mixed—one cannot merge from one into the other," in 1908. Wyeth was a realist painter at a time when photography began to compete with this craft. Often viewed as melodramatic, Wyeth's illustrations were designed for quick and easy comprehension. Wyeth was descended from Nicholas Wyeth, a stonemason who settled in Massachusetts from England in 1645. His subsequent ancestors played prominent roles in the French and Indian Wars, the Revolutionary War, the War of 1812, and the American Civil War. This made for a rich oral histories and tradition within the Wyeth family and provided a connection to much of the subject matter for his art. Wyeth's mother encouraged his artistic development from early on. His maternal ancestors were from Switzerland. As a child, his mother was acquainted with Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. His appreciation of literature is credited to her. The eldest of four brothers, Wyeth spent much of his youth hunting, fishing and working his family's farm. These activities, combined with his well developed sense of observation sustained his inspiration for illustrations and essentially eliminated any need for models. By the age of 12, Wyeth was producing exceptional watercolor paintings. Wyeth was the prodigal understudy of artist Howard Pyle and became one of America's most iconic illustrators and artists. He attended Mechanics Arts School to study drafting and then the Massachusetts Normal Arts School and the Eric Pape School of Art to learn illustration, under the supervision of George L. Noyes and Charles W. Reed. In 1902, Wyeth was invited to join two friends who had been accepted to Howard Pyle's School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Pyle was considered the "Father of American Illustration," and Wyeth quickly grasped Pyle's methods and artistic philosophy. Excursions to historical sites and spontaneous dramas involving costumes and props, were common approaches Pyle took with his students. These were intended to stimulate emotion, imagination, atmosphere and observation of humans-in-action. Pyle's lessons stressed historical accuracy and bore hints of romance. However, where Pyle's work focused on exquisite detail, Wyeth tended toward looser, quicker strokes, relying heavily on ominous shadows and moody background themes. He may have adopted his glazing technique from Pyle. His first commissioned work as an illustrator came in February 1903, when he created a bucking-bronco image for the Saturday Evening Post. At the time he declared his works were, "true, solid American subjects, (with) nothing foreign about them." Wyeth was again commissioned by the Post to illustrate a Western story in 1904. Pyle encouraged Wyeth to travel to the West to seek out subjects and gain direct knowledge of the region's geography and inhabitants. He worked as a cowboy in Colorado, visited a Navajo Reserve in Arizona and worked as a mail carrier delivering mail on horseback. Writing home, he described his Western adventure,""The life is wonderful, strange—the fascination of it clutches me like some unseen animal," continuing, "it seems to whisper, 'Come back, you belong here, this is your real home.'" In 1906, a second trip through the American West familiarized him with mining and included his acquiring of Native American clothing, cowboy attire and artifacts. Returning home to Chadds Ford, Wyeth created for Scribner's Magazine, a series of farm scenes and where he later produced Mowing, considered one of his masterworks of American rural life. A year later he wed Carolyn Bockius, of Wilmington and the two settled in Chadds Ford to raise their new family. Wyeth was an inspiring father for his five children: Andrew Wyeth, Henriette Wyeth Hurd, Carolyn Wyeth, Ann Wyeth McCoy, and Nathaniel C. Wyeth, who would all go on to have their own successful careers in the arts or science. At his home he entertained such guests as writers F. Scott Fitzgerald, Joseph Hergesheimer, Hugh Walpole and actors John Gilbert and Lillian Gish, Around 1911, Wyeth saw a departure from his Western subjects began illustrating classic literature. He created a series of illustrations for an edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, which is considered his finest group of images. He went on to illustrate editions of Kidnapped in 1913, Robin Hood in 1917, The Last of the Mohicans in 1919, Robinson Crusoe in 1920, Rip Van Winkle in1921, The White Company in1922, and The Yearling in1939. He received work from many of the most prominent periodicals of the day, including Century, Harper's Monthly, Ladies' Home Journal, McClure's, Outing, The Popular Magazine, and Scribner's. Wyeth read each book thoroughly before producing the contracted illustrations. He particularly focused on scenes that were sparsely described in the books, choosing to add his own details and frame of mind. Wyeth became weary of the commercialism upon which he had become financially dependent by 1914, and would accuse himself of “bitch[ing] myself with the accursed success in skin-deep pictures and illustrations.” Complaining of the money men "who want to buy me piecemeal" and continuing, "an illustration must be made practical, not only in its dramatic statement, but it must be a thing that will adapt itself to the engravers' and printers' limitations. This fact alone kills that underlying inspiration to create thought. Instead of expressing that inner feeling, you express the outward thought… or imitation of that feeling." Wyeth's commercial work included posters, calendars, and advertisements for clients such as Lucky Strike, Cream of Wheat, and Coca-Cola, as well as paintings of Beethoven, Wagner, and Liszt for Steinway & Sons. His murals adorn the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston, the Westtown School, the First National Bank of Boston, the Hotel Roosevelt, the Franklin Savings Bank, the National Geographic Society, and other public and private buildings. Through the First and Second World Wars, Wyeth created several iconic images for the government's bond drives and military recruiting. He restored an old captain’s house named "Eight Bells" after a Winslow Homer painting, in Port Clyde, Maine, in the 1930s, where he and his family summered. There he painted predominantly seascapes. At that time, museums had begun to acquire his paintings, and by 1941, he had been elected to the National Academy and was exhibited on a regular basis. On October 19, 1945, N.C. Wyeth and his grandson (Nathaniel C. Wyeth's son) were tragically killed when his car stalled on a railroad crossing near his Chadds Ford home. Contact
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