Wyeth, N. C. 1882-1945

(Full name Newell Convers Wyeth) American painter and illustrator.

The following entry presents an overview of Wyeth's career through 2003.

INTRODUCTION

Wyeth is regarded as one of the most famous and skilled American illustrators of early twentieth-century literature. In his artwork, Wyeth blends realistic forms and landscapes with light and shadow to create images infused with suspense and emotion. Particularly known for his work in the Scribner Illustrated Classics series, Wyeth created a vast catalog of richly iconic paintings for such classic tales of romance and adventure as Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans, and Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, among others. Wyeth's indelible contribution to these archetypal works has made his illustrations familiar to generations of young readers.

BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION

Wyeth was born October 22, 1882, in Needham, Massachusetts. He spent his entire childhood on his family farm, surrounded by animals and natural landscapes. Wyeth attended Needham High School, but was miserable with formal education, preferring to sketch and draw his surroundings. His mother persuaded his father to allow Wyeth to enroll in the Mechanic Arts High School in Boston, where he studied architecture and drafting. After graduating in 1899, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Normal Art School in 1900, studied under Eric Pape at the Eric Pape School of Arts in 1901, and studied under Charles W. Reed in 1902. In late 1902 Wyeth applied to the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, run by Howard Pyle, the preeminent illustrator of the time. Wyeth was conditionally accepted in 1902 and shortly thereafter earned the right to be considered a full time student. Pyle held classes during the winter months in Wilmington, and during the summer months in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, located in the historic Brandywine River valley. (This would later lead to Wyeth being identified as one of the "Brandywine" artists of the era.) During his first year at Pyle's school, Wyeth began illustrating magazines for commission. In 1904 he graduated from the Howard Pyle School and traveled to the American West. His travels provided the impetus for many of his western landscapes, and Wyeth began a collection of frontier props and tools, which he incorporated in his later illustrations. In 1906 Wyeth married Carolyn Brenneman Bockius, and the couple moved to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Wyeth and his wife had five children: three daughters—Henriette, Carolyn, and Ann—and two sons—Nathaniel and Andrew. In 1911 Wyeth accepted a commission to illustrate a series of novels for Charles Scribner's Sons. His first illustrated novel for Scribner's was their 1911 edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. The edition was extremely successful and became the catalyst for a partnership between Wyeth and Scribner's that would last for thirty years. Although the majority of his work during those thirty years was exclusively for Scribner's, Wyeth also illustrated for various magazines—Harper's Monthly, Saturday Evening Post, and McClure's—and publishers—The Mysterious Stranger (1916) for Harper and Brothers, Robin Hood (1917) for David McKay publishers, and The Courtship of Miles Standish (1920) for Houghton Mifflin. In the 1930s, Wyeth began focusing more on canvas and mural painting and less on book illustrations. During this period, he painted "Apotheosis of the Family" for the Wilmington Savings Fund Society in 1932 and a series of murals for New York's Metropolitan Life Insurance Company. On October 19, 1945, Wyeth was driving with his grandson when an oncoming train struck their car; both died moments after the accident.

MAJOR WORKS

Outstanding for its rich color, technical craftsmanship, and realistic portrayals of American life, Wyeth's artwork has adorned more than thirty published editions of various works of fiction and nonfiction. His first major success as an illustrator came with his work on the Charles Scribner's Sons' Children's Illustrated Classics edition of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island. His evocative paintings for Treasure Island contributed to the suspense of Stevenson's descriptions of young Jim Hawkins' adventures among the pirates. One illustration from the 1911 edition, entitled "Jim Hawkins Leaves Home," creates an emotionally stirring portrait of a young man leaving his mother and the pain she experiences because of their separation. In the illustration "Israel Hands," Wyeth depicts the moment when the pirate Israel Hands and Jim Hawkins reach a dangerous stalemate—Hands grabbing his knife and Hawkins ready with two guns. Earlier illustrators had shown Hawkins shooting Hands, yet to add to the reader's suspense, Wyeth only presents the stand-off, bolstering the reader's imagination and fueling their desire to continue on with the text. The 1911 Scribner's edition of Treasure Island quickly sold out in its first two printings. Scribner's commissioned Wyeth to illustrate two other Stevenson adventures, Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 (1913) and The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1916). The popularity of these volumes led to further work for Wyeth, not only with Scribner's, but also with other publishing houses. In the Scribner's reissue of James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans (1919) and The Deerslayer; or The First War-Path (1925), Wyeth's personal experiences in the American West contributed to his representations of the wilderness and Native Americans. Wyeth's artwork graces several other classic novels, including Robinson Crusoe (1920), Jane Porter's The Scottish Chiefs (1921), and Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings' The Yearling (1939). Additionally, Wyeth provided paintings for several reissues of such poetic works as Poems of American Patriotism (1922), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's The Courtship of Miles Standish and Song of Hiawatha (1929), and The Odyssey of Homer (1929).

CRITICAL RECEPTION

Wyeth's illustrations have been widely acclaimed by both literary critics and art historians for their realistic use of shadow and color to evoke emotion. Observers have noted that while other illustrators often painted the most climatic moments from the works they were adapting, Wyeth's tendency to illustrate the moments before these pivotal events added to the reader's suspense and enjoyment, fostering the symbiotic bond between the illustrator and the author of the text. Similarly, reviewers have praised Wyeth's decision to paint scenes and characters that are not fully described by the author, thereby providing illustrations that augment the text. Judy L. Larson has asserted that, "[t]he appeal of Wyeth's illustrations lie in their color and composition. The colors were selected to set the mood—splashes of oranges and reds for the forest fight scene in the Last of the Mohicans (1919); or grays, icy blues, and eerie greens for the scene of "Old Pew" (Treasure Island). Wyeth had a talent for choosing a composition and view point which best enhanced the drama of the illustration."

AWARDS

Wyeth was awarded the Beck Prize of the Academy of Fine Arts in 1910 and elected to the National Academy of Design in 1941.

PRINCIPAL WORKS

As Illustrator

The Long Roll [by Mary Johnston] (novel) 1911

Treasure Island [by Robert Louis Stevenson] (novel) 1911

Cease Firing [by Mary Johnston] (novel) 1912

Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751 [by Robert Louis Stevenson] (novel) 1913

The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses [by Robert Louis Stevenson] (novel) 1916

The Mysterious Stranger: A Romance [by Mark Twain] (novel) 1916

The Boy's King Arthur: Sir Thomas Malory's History of King Arthur and His Knights of the Round Table [edited by Sidney Lanier] (folklore and legend) 1917

Robin Hood [by Paul Creswick] (novel) 1917

The Mysterious Island [by Jules Verne] (novel) 1918

The Last of the Mohicans: A Narrative of 1757 [by James Fenimore Cooper] (novel) 1919

The Courtship of Miles Standish [by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow] (poem) 1920

Robinson Crusoe [by Daniel Defoe] (novel) 1920

Westward Ho!; or, The Voyages and Adventures of Sir Amyas Leigh . . . [by Charles Kingsley] (novel) 1920

Rip Van Winkle [by Washington Irving] (short story) 1921

The Scottish Chiefs [by Jane Porter] (novel) 1921

Poems of American Patriotism [compiled by Brander Matthews] (poetry) 1922

The White Company [by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle] (novel) 1922

David Balfour: Being the Memoirs of the Further Adventures of David Balfour [by Robert Louis Stevenson] (novel) 1924

The Deerslayer; or The First War-Path [by James Fenimore Cooper] (novel) 1925

The Oregon Trail: Sketches of Prairie and Rocky Mountain Life [by Francis Parkman] (nonfiction) 1925

Michael Strogoff: A Courier of the Czar [by Jules Verne] (novel) 1927

Drums [by James Boyd] (novel) 1928

The Odyssey of Homer [translated by Charles Herbert Palmer] (epic poem) 1929

Song of Hiawatha [by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow] (poem) 1929

The Little Shepherd of Kingdom Come [by John Fox, Jr.] (novel) 1931

Men of Concord . . . As Portrayed in the Journal of Henry David Thoreau [edited by Francis H. Allen] (history and essays) 1936

Trending into Maine [by Kenneth Roberts] (essays) 1938

Ramona [by Helen M. Jackson] (novel) 1939

The Yearling [by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings] (novel) 1939

The Houghton Mifflin Anthology of Children's Literature [compiled by Edna Johnson and Carrie E. Scott] (novels, short stories, and essays) 1940

N. C. Wyeth's Pilgrims [text by Robert D. San Souci] (illustrations) 1991

Other Works

The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945 [edited by Betsy James Wyeth] (correspondence) 1971

GENERAL COMMENTARY

Richard McLanathan (essay date 1971)

SOURCE: McLanathan, Richard. "Foreword." In The Brandywine Heritage, pp. 7-15. Greenwich, Conn.: New York Graphic Society Ltd., 1971.

[In the following excerpt, McLanathan examines noted artist Howard Pyle's influence on Wyeth and studies the similarities and differences in the two artists' work.]

Considering the traditional American pride in resourcefulness and ingenuity, it is a curious conceit of recent artistic criticism to belittle illustration and illustrators. Even when someone is credited with being a successful illustrator, he is somehow thereby deprived of the elevated status of artist. The fact of the matter is that American artists have traditionally turned their hands to a variety of tasks as practicality or fancy might dictate. The creative mind in America has never been satisfied to follow those neatly defined channels of expression which have characterized much of European art during recent centuries. The American muse is an unruly sort of girl with an entirely feminine and charming tendency toward the unpredictable. When Robert Fulton, for example,—no mean portraitist—, ran out of funds in Paris with which to finance his experiments on the steamboat, he painted a large panorama of The Burning of Moscow, advertised it, charged admission, and when he had made enough money, turned back to the steamboat. Samuel F. B. Morse displayed similar versatility. His life-size, full-length Lafayette in New York's City Hall is one of the outstanding portraits of the period, and we all know what he did with the telegraph, though I am afraid too few of us know what he achieved with the paint brush. It was the once-famous American neo-classic sculptor, Horatio Greenough, who, around the middle of the last century, first warned us of the willfulness of the American muse when he recognized the developing clipper ship, brought to perfection by Donald McKay, along with the large-wheeled, light-as-a-feather trotting wagon, as works of art. Indeed, he went further and anticipated a new American esthetic which many of us have not yet quite caught up with after more than a century, when he defined beauty as "the promise of function."

To turn specifically to the matter of the artist and the illustrator, our history shows that it would be a denial of the American tradition to separate the two, relegating each to a different level of achievement. Asher B. Durand, one of the leading landscapists of the 19th century, and for years the respected president of the National Academy, was not only a skilled engraver, but also an illustrator. So were George Catlin, Winslow Homer, Elihu Vedder, and Frederic Remington, not to mention several members of The Eight, among them William Glackens and John Sloan. And there are many other examples, major and minor, as well.

The real distinction lies elsewhere, in the illustrator's ability, in Pyle's words, "to fill out the text rather than to make a picture of some scene described in it." As he told his students, it is "the difference between creative and imitative art" that matters. With true American pragmatism, he taught his pupils that when "making pictures to be reproduced in print you are then given no favor and your pictures must be good as pictures or else they are of no possible use." His "final aim in teaching" was to produce "painters of pictures." "To this end," he wrote, "I regard magazine and book illustration as a ground from which to produce painters."

In Pyle's own work, his wide-ranging imagination combined with a hard-won technical versatility enabled him to give convincing form to many characters and episodes of history and fiction. This gift he shared with his most distinguished pupil, N. C. Wyeth. For several generations of Americans, the mention of the pirate Blackbeard, of Robin Hood, of the knights of the round table, of characters from Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Black Arrow brings to mind with vivid clarity the creations of Howard Pyle and N. C. Wyeth. This achievement certainly admits them to the highest echelon of illustrators. And, when one sees the originals of those familiar and compelling illustrations, whether in the knowingly controlled line in black and white, or in the painterly handling of oil, there can remain little doubt about their being genuine artists as well.

Both men were, and to a great extent still are, broadly popular artists, a quality they share with N. C.'s son Andrew and his grandson, James. All are closely identified with the Brandywine valley and Chadds Ford. Pyle had known the area well since boyhood. He lived and taught in Wilmington, though for some years he commuted to Philadelphia, where his classes at the Drexel Institute (1894-1900) won a similar loyalty from his pupils as had those of Thomas Eakins at the Pennsylvania Academy a decade or so earlier. Pyle conducted a summer school at Chadds Ford for some years, and it was there that N. C. Wyeth settled after early years in Needham, outside Boston, and youthful adventures in the still wild West.

The New England connection has been maintained by the Wyeths through summers on the Maine coast. Within a world limited to the valley's gentle slopes, water meadows, and upland fields defined by forests of hardwoods, and the austere northern shore, rocky and windswept, first N. C., and then Andrew, and now James have found all the scope necessary for their art. For all of them, it has been an art unusually self-motivated and self-developed. Pyle's brief study in his teens with a totally unknown, Antwerp-trained artist named Van der Weilen, and a year or so's rather hit-or-miss attendance at the Art Students' League in New York, provided basic academic fundamentals. His anatomical work with a Philadelphia surgeon—a parallel to Eakins' rigorous training—was probably more significant for his future. Beyond this he charted his own course, driven by a powerful determination. As demanding of himself as of his students, he developed within his own work what he sought to bring out in theirs—resolved expressions of a richly pictorial imagination. "Pictures," he wrote to a friend, "are the creations of the imagination and not of technical facility, and that . . . which art students most need is the cultivation of their imagination and its direction into practical and useful channels of creation—and I hold that this is exactly in line with all other kinds of professional education, whether of law, medicine, finance, or physics. I would not belittle the necessity of accurate technical training. I insist upon that in my own school even more strenuously than it is insisted upon in the great art schools of the country; but I subordinate that technical training entirely to the training of the imagination . . ."

N. C. Wyeth had had some formal training in the Massachusetts Normal Art School and the Eric Pape School in Boston. More than any other of Pyle's pupils, he responded to the intense cultivation of the imagination, giving it a robust expression which reflects his boundless energy and outgoing attitude toward life in complete contrast to Pyle's iron reserve. Wyeth, in turn, and in his own distinctive way, passed on the tradition to his son Andrew as well as to his daughters Henriette and Carolyn, and Andrew continued in the training of his son James. So what is represented by this exhibition is a kind of artistic dynasty comparable in American art only to the painting Peales of Philadelphia. Except for Henriette, who married one of her father's pupils, Peter Hurd, landscapist, portrait painter, and artistic interpreter of the mountains and the deserts of the Southwest, the rest have maintained the same close relation with the valley. Yet it has not been as a refuge from reality, but rather as a base, free of suburbia's petty distractions, with an atmosphere sympathetic to the individualistic and creative life. [. . .]

Pyle's lettering was excellent, and his sense of the combination of lettering and illustration, as on covers and titles, was highly developed. Though N. C. Wyeth must have learned something of this from Pyle, he has his own marked abilities in this field. Yet it was only in a few of his later works that he was free to design complete titles and covers, so mechanical had book-production become. His largeness of spirit and natural enthusiasm led him to paint the originals for illustrations, which were to be reproduced at the scale of the page of a normal-size bound volume, in the form of large canvasses which are unmistakably paintings in their own right. They show his love for the oil medium in their rich and textured surfaces, broadly handled, and painterly far beyond the necessities of illustration. Where Pyle's compositions were often carefully architectural and tended to be linear in structure, Wyeth's seem spontaneous and organic, made up of large forms, curving outlines, and dramatic light and shade with rich color. His characters are more strongly individualized than Pyle's. They have an earthiness and often a touch of robust humor. They are full of life and gusto, and have none of the delicate fantasy which sometimes appears in Pyle. Yet they have invention and variety, and also, in their larger forms and dramatic use of dark shadow often have a touch of the sinister. Their mood is pervasive, their images powerful. Their range is from the brutal effectiveness of Blind Pew through the suspenseful, momentary silence of The Vedette to the sensitivity of The Newborn Calf. Pyle occasionally lapsed into sentiment, Wyeth never.

Pyle was eclectic in a positive, not a negative sense. He was also influenced by Holbein, Hogarth, and the early German masters, especially Dürer, as seen in his command of a decorative line which appears in his Robin Hood, Arthurian books, The Wonder Clock, and Otto of the Silver Hand. Yet it was his own line, controlled by his own sense of order. Wyeth also had a personal line in his black and white work, and a sense of the relation of drawing to the book, but, because of the changes of the times, he had less opportunity to show his individuality in this way. Instead, his distinctive artistic personality, reflecting Emersonian ideals no doubt acquired during his New England boyhood, led him into a more personal involvement with life in his art, resulting in a vividness of impact which was all his own. He lived the precepts which Pyle offered his pupils: "throw your heart into the picture then jump in after it . . . ; feel the wind and rain on your skin when you paint it . . ." Because he naturally thought large, Wyeth also did a number of murals. Unfortunately he wrote far less than Pyle, though we know from articles and letters that he had a lively prose style and a feeling for mood and drama parallel to that shown in his painting. Both shared an intense preoccupation with the past, not as something dead and gone, but as made up of living, feeling people. Both accumulated a large collection of ancient costumes, uniforms, and artifacts. Where Pyle was scholarly in every detail of his historical compositions, and was factual to a degree, Wyeth felt them as well as accurately recreated them, and tended to identify the past with his own experience, using familiar sights, models and objects from his own environment in a way which anticipates the approach of his son Andrew.

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James H. Duff (essay date July-August 1980)

SOURCE: Duff, James H. "The American West of N. C. Wyeth." American West 17, no. 4 (July-August 1980): 32, 56-8.

[In the following essay, Duff examines Wyeth's early career and his captivation with the American western frontier, commenting that Wyeth's "experience in the West resulted in paintings which for generations and to millions of people have brought beauty, joy, and a sense of special adventure."]

"Art flourishes where there is a sense of adventure," said Alfred North Whitehead. N. C. Wyeth's life, as much as any artist's, seems to prove the philosopher's point. The superb quality of Wyeth's art certainly results from careful observation and a wonderful technique, but just as surely it reflects a spirit that sought and found excitement in almost every experience. Newell Convers Wyeth's enormous energy, inquisitiveness, and love of romance made his life a nearly unceasing series of adventures. The viewer before his paintings, more than the biographer, senses the very real place such adventures have in each work of art.

Wyeth's involvement with the American West was simultaneously an adventure of deeds and of ideas. It resulted in a large number of paintings which represent the West in many forms, in exacting detail, and with great sympathy. Like countless Americans before and since, Wyeth grew up with the imagery of the West and found its romance impossible to ignore. He immersed himself in the life of the West, and made it a major theme in his career. For a while, he gave the West all his attention, and it helped him to become one of the greatest illustrators of all time.

Wyeth grew up in Needham, Massachusetts, where he was born in 1882. His family had maintained New England homesteads since 1645, and a sense of history was a permanent element in formal and informal education. Around the family farm, the countryside was beautiful. Wyeth learned to respect hard work and to ride and care for horses. He did his first drawings there, and his talent convinced his family to arrange an art education.

After attending the Eric Pape School of Art in Boston, after studying with George L. Noyes at Annisquam in 1901 and with Charles W. Reed in 1902, Wyeth decided to make illustration the focus of his artistic career. His youth had given him the experience and perspective to make important art possible:

My brothers and I were brought up on a farm.... This early training gave me a vivid appreciation of the part the body plays in action. Now, when I paint a figure on horseback, a man plowing, or a woman buffeted by the wind, I have an acute sense of the muscle strain, the feel of the hickory handle, or the protective bend of head and squint of eye that each pose involves. After painting action scenes I have ached for hours because of having put myself in the other fellow's shoes as I realized him on canvas.

Wyeth's enthusiasm was there from the beginning. But his most important studio lessons and technical development came at the Howard Pyle School of Art in Wilmington, Delaware, and Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. Howard Pyle was the master. In the "golden age of American illustration," he was the reigning artist whose work was the best in publication and who, as teacher, became known as "the father of modern American illustration."

Pyle's fame and inspirational teaching attracted students who would be America's finest illustrators for decades thereafter. He restricted his classes to a handful of exceptional aspirants, demanding of them imagination even before artistic ability. A number of Pyle's protégés became famous for paintings and illustrations of the West in fact and fiction. The best known of these are Harvey Dunn, Philip R. Goodwin, Gayle Hoskins, Frank E. Schoonover, Allen Tupper True, and N. C. Wyeth. Young Wyeth arrived in Wilmington to study with Pyle in 1902 and was immediately welcomed as a special talent. By this time, Wyeth was comfortable with a variety of media and had developed a great deal of self-discipline. He displayed an especially fine visual memory and was able to portray emotion in his drawings and to suggest both strength and motion in his figures. The professional approach that Pyle offered was precisely the formal element necessary to bring forth excellent painting. And in Pyle's own art, always before him, Wyeth had the best possible example for a young illustrator.

N. C. knew the West as any American student of his day knew it. He was familiar with the images of Catlin, Remington, and others, and was no stranger to stage-coaches, Indians, cowboys, or cattle drives, regardless of his geographical distance from them. The literature of the day provided a wealth of information and gave a strong, active imagination ideas for drawings and paintings. Some of Wyeth's earliest subjects for Pyle's classes were western, and it was not long after arriving in Wilmington that he sold a painting of a bronco buster to the Curtis Publishing Company. Still a student, N. C. Wyeth suddenly had his work on the cover of the nationally distributed and important Saturday Evening Post.

However, student days were not over, and despite an increasing number of commissions from important publishers, N. C. was to spend years under Pyle's direct influence. During this period, he worked with earnest concentration on basic disciplines. He painted with models for endless hours, he visited important galleries and significant exhibitions, and he roamed the countryside (particularly around Chadds Ford), to exercise his love of nature. He was a robust man, strong and energetic with a massive physical appearance. His sense of humor was well known. His activities in this period reveal an extremely well-rounded individual, aware of both the history and the world around him, aware of both his own art and the artistic world which developed in the first years of this century.

Until late 1904, N. C. Wyeth painted a western America he had not seen. This practice contradicted one of Howard Pyle's most important precepts: the artist should know his subject as intimately as possible. By August of 1904 Wyeth began to think about traveling west, largely because at that time The Saturday Evening Post asked him to illustrate a western story. He prepared himself for the trip by studying Indian customs, because he intended to live among Indians for a time.

It was not until September of 1904, that the twenty-two-year-old artist left for the West by train. His first destination was Denver, where the family of classmate Allen Tupper True lived. Joseph Chapin, art editor at Scribner's, arranged transportation, and the True family provided room and board, a base for further travels, and encouragement. Chapin expected that Scribner's would be repaid with material for publication. The True's hospitality was for its own sake, a friendly gesture toward their son's classmate. It was hospitality, N. C. said, "an easterner can't understand until he has really experienced it."

To his mother on September 29, 1904, N. C. wrote, "Here I am in the great West, and I'll tell you it is the great West." Immediate enthusiasm was his response to the precise images he had been seeking. That first letter from Denver goes on: "Once looking ahead from the car window I made out a cloud of white alkali dust; of course I thought it was some windstorm or possibly a stampede of cattle, but soon a black speck appeared and upon coming nearer it proved to be an old stage coming across country. It set me wild! The old driver up in the box with his high sombrero, a long bullwhip in his hand, blue shirt and vest, white kerchief around his neck, high-topped boots and all literally covered with this white dust. These things continually appeared, thus keeping me in a frenzy of excited expectation."

In that "frenzy of excited expectation" there may have been youthful naiveté, but there was also the requisite keen perception of the artist. Wyeth's letters testify again and again to his observation of details and his memory for those details. It was on such memories and on the knowledge he quickly gained of western customs, that he was to base decades of illustrations.

After being in Colorado for only a few hours, Wyeth was willing to render opinions of importance. "I am gratified to think that my conceptions of the West were about right. In fact I feel perfectly at home here." Confidence that his expectations had been accurate was reinforced by his visit to the small town of Deer Trail, Colorado, Wyeth stopped there on his way to Hash-Knife Ranch, approximately forty miles away, where he expected to work as a cowpuncher. He had spent fifty-five dollars for his rig: "blue shirt, corduroy breeches, hightop boots, belt and pistol, spurs, quirt, good saddle and bridle, blankets, rubber coat, paint box; and camera completes my outfit....Thus, I shall pass into the land of sun and sky."

From the beginning of his experience beyond Denver, N. C. Wyeth was a participant in the life of the West. Diary entries and letters from this period show that he encountered varying circumstances, although at times variety must have escaped him. He began one letter to his mother: "Out of the west window, plains; out of the east, plains; out of the north window, plains; out of the south, plains." But on these plains he sketched and collected information. Wyeth worked in one eventful roundup for a period he called "the wildest and most strenuous three weeks in my life."

When Wyeth returned to Denver, life seemed calm, and he rented a studio where he could give form on canvas to his recent adventures. He painted for two weeks and produced four major works: A Bucking Horse in Camp, On the Circle, Roping Horses in the Corral, and Around the Grub Wagon. These paintings were publicly exhibited in Denver for two or three weeks at Steiner's Gallery. They were Wyeth's first full-color efforts, and while he knew they were authentic in detail, he was concerned about the color: "The color in the West is magnificent and cannot be touched with paint and brush."

Wyeth saw a good deal more of that native color on visits to Indian reservations where he watched the trading and photographed and sketched Navajos. He traveled to Arizona, slept in hogans, and discovered that Indians were not happy to have their photographs taken. Perhaps this discovery is what induced N. C. to make some of the finest and most famous drawings of his career, beautiful pencil sketches of Navajo men and women.

Wyeth returned to Wilmington with mixed feelings: "How I hated to leave those Indians and how I shall miss the many long silent evenings spent with them in their 'hogans', seated around a flaming pile of crackling pinon listening to the low plaintive moan of the wind as it swirled down the canyon...." The West was clearly in his blood and on his mind. But a stronger influence was the career he had set for himself, the steady pursuit of successful illustration. He told his mother that he was not seeking another trip West. "I say No! I want money now and I'm going to knuckle right down and get rich...."

Wyeth soon contributed a number of important western paintings as illustrations to Scribner's. His work was maturing and was superior to almost any other then available to publishers. From 1904 on, he was known to publishers and public as a western illustrator. With growing enthusiasm in 1905, Wyeth furnished illustrations for popular westerns in The Saturday Evening Post, Harper's, The Ladies' Home Journal, and other national magazines.

Wyeth's second trip West was sponsored by The Outing Magazine in early 1906. His destination was Grand County, Colorado, and he was to gather information regarding mine engineering. Once again he threw himself into his special experience. He rode a work train and acted as fireman, stoking engine fires in sub-zero weather. He wrote about it as "a grand and glorious trip full of incident."

The pace of Wyeth's life quickened in 1906. Commissions came in such numbers and from so many different sources that he seems to have been almost confused by the action. He said that he was "beginning to believe that illustrating is as hard as any other work.... I've stuck to it pretty steadily outside my western trips and I'm starting to feel it." Wyeth continued to provide many illustrations for popular western stories in McClure's, Scribner's, and Outing.

In August of 1906, the artist announced: "I have turned out the best picture I ever painted. It's a moonlight scene in the West. Eight miners digging through a 14-foot drift during intensely cold weather." This was probably The Snow Shovels, one of four works for "How They Opened the Snow Road" by W. M. Raine and W. H. Eader. These extremely large canvases were reproduced in color by Outing in January, 1907. A restrained palette and careful use of light make the paintings stand out as a special group with unique characteristics.

Also in 1906 Wyeth anticipated his third trip West. He wanted to reach Billings, Montana, and planned carefully for the journey. But events crowded him, and he was able to make his travel time last only as far as the stockyards of Chicago and Kansas City. He never ventured West again. The year had been a time of great activity and production, but it had also been a time of important changes. In April he had married Carolyn Bockius of Wilmington, and throughout the year he had confronted some not-so-simple or pleasant aspects of the commercial illustrator's world. The pressures of commissions were strongly felt, and he had several serious difficulties with his mentor, Howard Pyle. N. C. was anxious for personal freedom, and his growing self-confidence suggested many changes in life style. He wrote: "As time goes by I seem to be drawing closer and closer to the quiet 'domestic' farm life.... Another thing! I don't believe any man who ever painted a great big picture did so by wandering from one place to another searching for interesting material. By the gods! There's almost an inexhaustible supply of subjects right around my back door."

Wyeth began to paint nonwestern subjects with increasing frequency. Publishers offered him assignments relating to American history. The eastern woodland Indian became a special subject for him. Nonetheless, in 1907 he illustrated western subjects for both novels and magazines. He was pleased when an assignment from Scribner's resulted in the 1908 painting, The Locating Engineer (see page 41), a painting he often referred to as deserving of attention. He was also enthusiastic about his 1908 "Sun-Dance pictures," including Calling the Sundance and Invocation to the Buffalo Herds.

A notable event was the January, 1909, publication by Scribner's of N. C.'s western narrative A Sheep-Herder of the South-West. It is notable because of the charming story and because of the excellence of the illustrations, among them some of his finest paintings. The story tells of Wyeth's experience with a Navajo boy who taught him much. The illustrations, however, are more generalized views of sheepherding. He commented, "One would hardly recognize them as mine, so different is the color arrangement and general technicalities." The illustrations include Navajo Herder in the Foothills (. . .), a superbly colored painting of an Indian boy sitting on a hillside overlooking his herd. The dust rising around and above his sheep enhances the scene, as does the carefully balanced light on selected subjects.

By the time this narrative was read across the country, there was no question that N. C. Wyeth was attempting to pull away from western work, despite his continuing fascination for the romance of the West. He told his family in 1908, "I am trying to instill into the minds of the magazine editors that I want subjects that are local, subjects that I can paint honestly and conscientiously...."N.C. wanted to paint more landscapes, to be, as he would have said, more a painter and less an illustrator. He demonstrated his love for the countryside by painting more and more illustrations using the farms, farmers, and buildings of the Brandywine River valley as his subjects. The works were published in widely circulated magazines and books, especially after 1907.

The West was, however, the subject with which the public at that time associated Wyeth, and, in 1910, he responded to a newspaper writer's interest in this fact: "With five years of almost incessant work, mostly western in character, I have experienced a remarkable change. My ardor for the West has slowly, but with increasing impetus, been dwindling, until my desires to go there to paint its people are already lukewarm. The West appealed to me as it would to a boy, a sort of external effervescence of spirit seemed to be all that substantiated my work."

The change to other subjects was very gradual, and the West continued to concern Wyeth for many years. When, in 1909, Scribner's bought his new painting, The Pay Stage, they "bought it quick and pronounced it the very best I ever did for them." Amid woodland Indians, farm scenes, Colonial American figures, and medieval images, he occasionally fashioned the West with his brush and illustrated many books by well-known western authors.

In 1916, for Hearst's magazine, N. C. painted ten illustrations for "The Great West That Was" by William F. Cody. The most memorable painting among them is A Fight on the Plains (. . .), which appeared with different captions in various publications. In this work, the artist painted his own portrait as one of the men in defense behind a dead mule barricade during an Indian attack. It is a carefully detailed work which inevitably evokes strong responses.

Wyeth built a large home and a large studio in Chadds Ford and felt he had found his place and his pace there. "At times I feel as though I would walk over one of these hills into a secluded valley and lie down, and there remain to grow slowly, oh, so slowly!" He raised five children near the Brandywine River, and the family began spending summers on the coast of Maine where he loved to paint local subjects, landscapes and seascapes. In 1921, he told a reporter for the Boston Sunday Post that he found the West "theatrical." He went on to say that the artist "may have the greatest sympathy for the people you meet, for the picturesqueness of their life and their traditions and clothing—but the time comes when his soul gets restless, and he finds that he has been enjoying a show in which he really has no fundamental part."

It has often been said that every artist is compelled to compose his autobiography, and it may be argued that N. C. Wyeth's art reflects his life to a large degree. It reflects his concern for a wide variety of contemporary and historical subjects and it reflects the enormous energy of the man. He wanted to be known as a painter more than as an illustrator, and he was a great American painter. His best paintings, from the early years until his death in 1945, are large works of superb technique, full of wonderful color, often full of action. Hardly any subject with which he worked appears to us more vividly than the American West. In the West he learned much about using color and showing the effects of light in painting. The early paintings resulting from his western travels did a great deal to establish his reputation among publishers and the public.

N. C. Wyeth painted thousands of illustrations. Probably the most famous and in the opinion of many, the best are the 1911 works for Treasure Island. He also illustrated The Black Arrow, Kidnapped, Robin Hood, The Boy's King Arthur, The Yearling, Robinson Crusoe, The Mysterious Island, The Last of the Mohicans, and book after book. He did seemingly countless illustrations for magazines. He painted murals and advertisements. Among his finest efforts are still-lifes and landscapes painted for his personal pleasure. Viewed within the scope of his total achievement, his western paintings appear relatively few in number.

But the western work is wonderful. The West was the great romantic center of his youth, and he threw himself into it before his ties became home and family. His experience in the West resulted in paintings which for generations and to millions of people have brought beauty, joy, and a sense of special adventure.

Bibliographic Note

This article draws upon material in Betsy James Wyeth, ed., The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945 (1971); and in Douglas Allen and Douglas Allen, Jr., N. C. Wyeth (1972).

Judy L. Larson (essay date 1981)

SOURCE: Larson, Judy L. "Heroes of Adventure and Romance." In Enchanted Images: American Children's Illustration, 1850-1925, pp. 37-8. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Santa Barbara Museum of Art, 1981.

[In the following excerpt, Larson describes Wyeth's illustrating technique and praises his ability to enhance texts through his exciting illustrations.]

Newell Convers Wyeth, one of Pyle's best students, followed in Pyle's footsteps by illustrating chiefly adventure stories. Charles Scribner introduced a series called Scribner's Illustrated Classics, easily recognized by their black linen boards, gilded spine lettering, and full-color illustration mounted on the front. Wyeth received his first commission for Robert Louis Stevenson's lively book Treasure Island (1911). The appeal of Wyeth's illustrations lie in their color and composition. The colors were selected to set the mood—splashes of oranges and reds for the forest fight scene in the Last of the Mohicans (1919); or grays, icy blues, and eerie greens for the scene of "Old Pew" (Treasure Island ). Wyeth had a talent for choosing a composition and view point which best enhanced the drama of the illustration. The space is usually open and often at an odd perspective; figures loom larger than life and are overpowering. The strong diagonal composition of the balloon scene from Mysterious Island (1918) for example, draws the viewer into the space of the participants. In "Old Pew," on the other hand, one has the feeling that with a few more steps, this blind old man will tumble off the picture space into our own. Wyeth achieved this effect by placing the action close to the picture plane and by lighting the scene with a dramatic source so that our attention cannot be lost. Wyeth also had an uncanny ability to choose scenes which aroused anticipation, showed the reader "the moment just before," and prompted the viewer to read the text. Wyeth had mastered the techniques of a good illustrator—he evoked the reader's curiosity without suppressing the imagination.

Kidnapped (1913), also by Stevenson and Black Arrow (1916) followed Treasure Island. Wyeth himself suggested Jules Verne's Mysterious Island (1918) as part of the series as it had been his favorite book as a child. Scribner felt 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea was a natural sequel, but Wyeth expressed strong feeling against doing it in a letter to the editor:

I positively cannot get up the least interest in Twenty Thousand Leagues etc. I have read it twice with all the concentration I am capable of and the damn thing sickens me ...

Obviously Wyeth took seriously Pyle's advice that an illustrator must have his heart in a picture. It is interesting to note, too, that the publisher respected Wyeth's wishes and did not press the issue. Wyeth, in the second generation of American illustrators, commanded a respect—if not a reverence—from the publishers who now realized how important illustrations could be in selling a novel or story.

Susan R. Gannon (essay date 1991)

SOURCE: Gannon, Susan R. "The Illustrator as Interpreter: N. C. Wyeth's Illustrations for the Adventure Novels of Robert Louis Stevenson." Children's Literature 19 (1991): 90-106.

[In the following essay, Gannon studies the symbiotic relationship between Robert Louis Stevenson's adventure novels and Wyeth's illustrations in the Scribner's Illustrated Classics series.]

Castles, sailing ships, a pirate cave; tall, big-boned figures caught in mid-gesture; and all the swords, boots, swirling cloaks, and flintlock pistols a romantic could wish—dramatically lit and freely painted. The illustrations for Stevenson's adventure novels in Scribner's Illustrated Classics series are obviously N. C. Wyeth's. But though all Wyeth's pictures share a family resemblance, each sequence of illustrations also renders a markedly personal reading of a single novel and has its own mood, tone, palette, and recurrent images. Wyeth's pictures, like all good illustrations, create for each novel a rich and rhetorically powerful narrative sequence well able to modify a reader's experience in significant ways; for, if narrativity is "the process by which a perceiver actively constructs a story from the fictional data provided by any narrative medium," it is clear that the reader's own active narrativity is susceptible to the powerful impact of an illustrator's vision as he or she works on the cues provided in the discourse "to complete the process that will achieve a story" (Scholes 60).

Stevenson himself appreciated this, commenting approvingly of a set of illustrations that its "designer also has lain down and dreamed a dream, as literal, as quaint, and almost as apposite as . . . [the author's]; and text and picture make but the two sides of the same homespun but impassioned story" ("Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress" 296). And Stevenson's discussion of those illustrations goes on to trace the interactions between text and picture as they might be experienced by a perceptive reader. Following Stevenson's lead, I would like to examine some of the choices Wyeth made in illustrating Stevenson's novels—choices which can shape a reader's experience of a novel in significant ways—and then to offer a reading of the way Wyeth's illustrations for Treasure Island (arguably his best) work together in sequence to interpret that text.

N. C. Wyeth illustrated four of Stevenson's adventure novels for Scribner's Illustrated Classics Series: Treasure Island (1911), Kidnapped (1913), The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses (1916), and David Balfour (1941). Wyeth's illustrations for each of these novels set up an immediate field of reference for the reader, enacting and embodying the story like a play or a film in specific visual terms. When the details of a verbal description are turned into visual images they become more precise and limited. A hat or coat must be cut a certain way; a human figure must be of a certain height and build; a house must have specific architectural features. Each choice which "places" details for the reader both limits and—paradoxically—offers a potential enrichment of the reading experience as the illustrator puts his own complex experience of the text at the reader's service.

One of the most important choices an illustrator can make is the selection of scenes to be shown. All of Wyeth's pictures accent thematic and structural development in the novels, but in the design of an illustrated book there are some illustrations which hold positions of special rhetorical force. In illustrating Stevenson's novels for the Illustrated Classics Series, Wyeth used cover, endpapers, and title page to make a strong thematic statement and set the tone for his whole interpretive reading of each novel. The cover of Kidnapped shows young David Balfour apparently stranded on the "island" of Earraid, unaware that he will be able to walk to freedom when the tide goes out. The cover of David Balfour, Stevenson's sequel to Kidnapped, dramatizes an important thematic difference between the novels. Highlighting the older David's inability to make any decisive moves for himself, it shows him bound hand and foot and carefully guarded, a real prisoner on a real island.

Wyeth also used endpapers to sum up the conflict in a book. In Treasure Island and in The Black Arrow, novels filled with violent contention for power and wealth, brutal pirates and members of an outlaw band stride purposefully across these pages, whereas the endpapers in David Balfour depict the Bass—the rocky islet on which David is helplessly imprisoned during much of the action. The title page sketches for both of the David Balfour novels metaphorically express the central concerns of the books. In each case the figure of David is more clearly realized and substantial than the shadowy and rather fantastic background, suggesting that the picture really shows what is on his mind. On the title page of Kidnapped a thoughtful David contemplates a dreamlike rendition of the House of Shaws; in the title sketch for David Balfour, a shadowy gibbet with its swinging noose looms over the frightened boy. Wyeth draws attention to the terrible dilemmas David faces. In the first book he must risk enslavement and death in order to claim his inheritance; in the second, if he offers the testimony needed to clear an innocent man of murder, he risks the gallows himself. Wyeth's cover and endpapers for David Balfour pinpoint at once the conflict between freedom and bondage, between action and passive acceptance of the status quo, which will dominate the story.

The illustrations for a book, by epitomizing the plot, can often serve as a sort of trailer for it, much like the "previews of coming attractions" familiar to us from the movies. Wyeth thought "a person should be able to walk into the book store and just thumb through a book and get the idea of the story by the drama of the illustrations—very quickly" (An American Vision 80). His pictures represent carefully chosen moments more or less evenly spaced throughout the story and so arranged as to provide not only a sense of the story's continuity, its drama and emotional force, but to complement each other aesthetically, offering contrast and comparison in subject matter, coloring, and design.

Andrew Wyeth has described his father's way of setting about deciding which moments in a novel to foreground for the reader: "after initially reading the story, especially if it was a good yarn, Pa would reread it carefully and underline the passages that he felt were the essence of the story" (An American Vision 80). When he looked for moments which would show "the essence" of a story, Wyeth sometimes chose obvious moments of crisis or decision—Jim Hawkins's confrontation of Israel Hands in Treasure Island is a good example. But sometimes he chose a moment which would capture his idea of a character (Ebenezer Balfour in Kidnapped crouched over his porridge, plotting murder) or a relationship (Silver in Treasure Island leading Jim Hawkins on a leash) or a situation (Dick Shelton and Joan Sedley in The Black Arrow at bay in the forest). In Stevenson, Wyeth was working with a writer who had a marvelous ability to paint vivid and succinct word pictures of people and places, an artist with a knack for setting up important scenes in a very dramatic way. Yet often Wyeth would avoid the very scenes Stevenson made most striking. In explaining to his son why he chose to illustrate a scene an author had not described very fully, Wyeth once said: "'Why take a dramatic episode that is described in every detail and redo it? Instead I create something that will add to the story'" (An American Vision 80).

That something is often a symbol of the whole as much as a simple image of one small part. Wyeth ignores the famous scene from Kidnapped in which David climbs the unfinished staircase at Shaws only to find himself poised on the brink of an abyss; instead, he settles on a less obvious scene which serves as an even better visual emblem of the entire situation in which David has been caught. The illustrator shows the boy stranded on a rock in the middle of a dangerous current, unable to move forward or backward until Alan Breck forces him to take a blind leap to safety. Wyeth focuses attention here on a moment of choice involving that combination of trust and daring which will be vital to David's ultimate salvation.

Highlighting two scenes which might easily have been passed over by the reader of Treasure Island, Wyeth uses them to symbolize the complex relationship between Jim Hawkins and Long John Silver. The first picture of the two together shows Silver as an amiable substitute father; the second reveals him to be a cruel bully. And the self-defeating confusion which prevents Dick Shelton in The Black Arrow from knowing who his real friends are is brilliantly captured in Wyeth's picture of him knee-deep in an icy sea, fighting his own potential ally Lord Foxham on so dark and snowy a night that neither of them can really see the other.

In most cases when Wyeth departs from Stevenson's text, it is because he is deliberately adding or omitting details for artistic and interpretive reasons of his own. Often Wyeth extends Stevenson's narrative, picking up some symbolic touch and giving it a clear visual reference which Stevenson never supplied. He captures very well Stevenson's intent to supply his hero with a series of "doubles" in The Black Arrow, older men who represent in various ways the kind of person Dick Shelton might grow up to be. Dick is given a vividly recognizable appearance. He is a tall, well-built boy with dark hair, an oval face, a strong profile, and straight brows that meet across his nose. As Dick Shelton and the outlaw appropriately named Lawless prowl stealthily through the snow toward Lawless's lair, they look almost like identical twins. The young Richard III who appears in the book seems older in the illustrations than he is said to be, resembling more the traditional image from historical portraits, but there is a speaking family resemblance between the infamous king and Dick—the same straight browline and profile; in his effort to create this effect, Wyeth even minimizes Richard's "crookback" so that it is hardly noticeable. Further, in the final illustration, depicting the last scene in the book, the scowling and dour Ellis Duckworth (the Robin Hood figure in the novel) who bids farewell to Dick is dressed exactly like him and could be the boy's older brother.

Wyeth uses his own recognition of an elaborately coded world to place the details of each Stevenson story firmly in a social and historical context. His use of physical types which have come to be associated in our culture with certain values is an important part of his rhetorical strategy. The brutal, battered-looking pirates who stride across the endpapers of Treasure Island announce their ruthlessness in their very physical presence. The wiry, lithe Alan Breck who fights best when cornered has a distinctly rodent-like grin as he battles the invaders of the roundhouse in David Balfour. His face tells you something of his mindset. Wyeth makes David Balfour a handsome, brawny boy, whose burly shoulders and well-developed, muscular arms and legs seem too powerful for his sensitive and almost girlish face. The artist adds a certain charm to this character, conveying David's boyish clumsiness as he sits awkwardly in a delicate Queen Anne chair in a fussy and crowded lawyer's office. The posture of the boy suggests strongly his sense of being not only a dirty and ragged stranger in this respectable place but also something of a young bull in the china shop.

If bodies have a language, then so do the shadows they cast; indeed, the human shadow has a rich and highly conventionalized set of meanings in art and literature, and Wyeth often uses it to symbolize a character's inner nature. Thus, Ebenezer Balfour's shadow looms ominously on the wall behind him as he eats his porridge and plots to murder his nephew, and Alan Breck's dances, twice his size, on the walls and ceiling of the roundhouse as he gamely fights off a pack of sailors aboard The Covenant. Sometimes a person's shadow is thrown before him, portending the ill effects of his actions, as in the case of the pirate Billy Bones on the cliffside, and sometimes a figure is surrounded by shadows which suggest an atmosphere of all-encompassing evil, as in the treasure cave scene in Treasure Island.

Wyeth gives his Stevenson characters eloquent body language, often presenting them in the act of making slightly exaggerated gestures which "mime" their intent. This slight exaggeration draws attention to the gesture and creates a certain fictionality about it—puts it in quotation marks, so to speak. Figures gesturing like this rely for some of their impact on arousing a kinesthetic response in the viewer like that evoked by Marcel Marceau "walking against the wind." Thus Dick Shelton and his henchman, Lawless, prowl through a snowy forest, bent forward intently, miming "stealth" with every muscle. Wyeth prided himself on his ability to convey this sort of effect, claiming that his early work on a farm had given him an "acute sense of the muscle strain . . . the feel . . . the protective bend of head and squint of eye that each pose involves." In fact he complained that "after painting action scenes I have ached for hours because of having put myself in the other fellow's shoes as I realized him on canvas" (quoted in Wyeth 6). That Stevenson shared Wyeth's appreciation of this particular effect is evidenced in his admiration for an illustrator's depiction of Bunyan's "Christian, posting through the plain, terror and speed in every muscle" and Mercy eager to go her journey with "every line" of her "figure yearning" ("Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress" 300).

There is, of course, a veritable lexicon of body language which can be called upon in drama, fiction, and illustration, so sometimes Wyeth need only quote from an already coded social text to make his point. A bereft mother in Treasure Island hides her face in her apron, and a conventionalized message is conveyed immediately about her social class, her powerlessness, her maternal feeling. When one of the Black Arrow's band climbs a tree to get the lay of the land his costume makes a silent allusion to Howard Pyle's illustrations for Robin Hood, while his brow-shading hand evokes "sailor searching the horizon" in a gesture at once conventional and mimelike.

Stevenson is famous for his use not only of gesture but of costumes and props to suggest aspects of character, and Wyeth follows him closely here. "Character," Stevenson once said, "to the boy is a sealed book; for him, a pirate is a beard, a pair of wide trousers, and a liberal complement of pistols" (Essays 261). He signals the outlaw status and desperate situation of Alan and Davie in Kidnapped by the increasingly wretched state of their clothes. Wyeth carefully shows the two declining into raggedness, picture by picture, until David suddenly springs forth in the final illustration in a fine brown suit, carrying a fashionable cane (not mentioned by Stevenson). The differing lots of the young gentleman and the man with a price on his head are brilliantly summed up by the contrast in their appearance in this last picture.

One of Wyeth's trademarks as an illustrator is his fondness for depicting actions caught in midmovement. Catriona's skirts billow out around her as she leaps from one ship to another; an inn sign just nicked by a sword blow swings violently from the impact; a sturdy inn table is shown tipping over and spilling its burden of pewterware. Though he is working in a static medium, Wyeth creates the illusion that each scene represents part of a rapid, almost headlong sequence of action. In doing so, he well reflects the speed and action of Stevenson's narrative, and he captures an effect Stevenson himself admired in another illustrator whose pictures he felt captured an author's "breathing hurry and momentary inspiration" ("Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress" 304).

It is not just choice of subject that determines Wyeth's interpretation of a particular novel but also choices of color, design, light, and shade. Wyeth's artistic choices operate as an effective visual rhetoric, creating pictures the viewer can "read." Each of his sets of illustrations has its own palette. The Balfour novels are set in a world of soft blues, greens, and silver-grays. The pictures for The Black Arrow suggest medieval illuminations in their clear colors and decorative detail, though a number of the scenes are dark and somber in tone: two young people drink from a forest pool under the stars; armed men struggle desperately in snowy battle scenes; a wounded spearman returns home just before dawn. Wyeth's Treasure Island is a place of harsh tropical sun and dark shadows, highly theatrical in the posing and lighting of the major scenes. The sunlight is dazzling as Jim leaves his seaside home for a shadowy world where good and evil will be strangely mixed. The shocking difference between two ways of life is symbolized by the arresting blocks of sharp and uncompromising light and shade in this picture. The same effect is repeated in one of the last pictures for the novel as Jim is marched from the bright cliffside into blue shadows by John Silver. In another picture, harsh yellow light from an oil lamp pours down on the cabin where the brutal Israel Hands struggles with his shipmate O'Brien, turning everything in the room flat brown and gold. And as Jim looks through a loophole in the stockade wall he sees a group of pirates crouched in a semicircle lit luridly from below by torchlight. In the final scene, a masterpiece of artistic restraint, Jim kneels in a fairy-tale cavern all in sepia tones, where the only bright spots are the glittering gold coins that seem dimly to illuminate the cave.

For Stevenson it is "the triumph of romantic storytelling" when the reader consciously plays at being the hero: "Then we forget the characters; then we push the hero aside; then we plunge into the tale in our own person and bathe in fresh experience; and then, and then only do we say we have been reading a romance" (Essays 231). Wyeth's use of perspective cleverly conveys the feel of Stevenson's narrative method. Over-the-shoulder views in which we see "with" the protagonist, who is placed in the foreground as an observer of action rather than a participant, are common in the pictures for those novels which are narrated in the first person. When David Balfour bids farewell to his old teacher, his back is to the viewer, and over his shoulder we see the old man and the landscape David must leave. Another device for emphasizing the first-person perspective is the presentation of a scene from an unusual angle distinctively identified with the narrator in the text. When David lies in bed, looking up at Alan and Cluny playing cards, the illustrator shows us the scene from a low angle, as David would have seen it; and when Jim Hawkins peeps through a cabin window or a chink in the stockade wall, we see what he sees.

The structural design of Wyeth's illustrations often underscores their meaning. When Catriona leaps dramatically from boat to boat in a rough sea, she falls right into David Balfour's outstretched arms. In this picture, his arms and her billowing petticoats form a small but attention-getting circle in a picture full of strong, thrusting diagonals. The completion of the circle also works well to suggest that David and Catriona, who in many ways represent different but necessary aspects of a single personality, belong together and cannot be "whole" unless each has what the other can give.

Color, lighting, and design are all used by Wyeth to convey his own reading of a scene in his portrait of Lord Prestongrange in David Balfour. The picture illustrating David's confrontation by the powerful Lord Advocate of Scotland shows them meeting in a darkened room. The tall figure of Prestongrange, looming in the darkness, dominates the scene. The shape of his elongated figure is echoed in the two candles he has lit—which give off a dazzling light—and in the wine decanter, glass, and candle snuffer on the table before him. One fist is on the table, knuckles down; and in the other hand, the taper he used to light the candle points down and toward the viewer. There is a dark shadowy area to the right of him, and the paneling behind him forms a large cross—suggesting again the gibbet, but also, perhaps, David's willingness to sacrifice himself for his friends. The picture dramatizes forcefully the emotional effect of interrogation by a judge whose power to condemn or free his prisoner is absolute, and Wyeth cleverly puts the viewer in the position of the prisoner.

Each set of illustrations Wyeth did for a Stevenson novel constitutes a highly personal reading of the written text, often accenting the undertones of tragic conflict which appealed to the artist. His pictures for The Black Arrow capture Stevenson's lightly satiric treatment of knighthood but also stress a darker suggestion that, in the corrupt world of this novel at least, the possibility of heroic action is no longer available.

Those of Stevenson's stories which are told in the first person by a mature narrator who explains both how he felt at the time of his adventures and what they mean to him now offer a special challenge to the illustrator. The ironic perspective the mature David Balfour can give to the story he relates in Kidnapped is rarely felt in the illustrations, which show us David as victim or—at best—survivor rather than as the foolish, stubborn prig the narrator feels himself to have been. Wyeth's pictures emphasize external events, dominated by the figures of energy and menace which seem so often to threaten David. But the essence of Stevenson's story, David's awkward, moment-to-moment struggle to appreciate and assimilate the virtues of his alter ego, Alan Breck, in order to become a more complete human being, cannot effectively be dramatized in fourteen pictures, though it is emblematized in several of them. Similarly, the pictures for the sequel, David Balfour, project effectively David's inability to act and the consequent aura of guilt which hangs about him, but the social comedy of Stevenson's story and the pained irony of the narrative voice are again missing.

Wyeth's pictures for Treasure Island, on the other hand, convey wonderfully well the intriguing doubleness of that novel, which from one perspective seems like a stirring adventure story; from another, something of a tragedy. Without ever picturing Stevenson's mature narrator, Wyeth has managed to create a parallel narrative to Stevenson's which stresses the difference between the way the story was experienced by its focal character and the way the teller understands it, now that he is older and wiser. But only a more detailed examination can do justice to the way Wyeth manages, in a brilliantly structured sequence of pictures, continually to remind the reader of the shadow side of young Jim Hawkins's blindness to the future without downplaying in the least the glamor and sheer romantic appeal of his adventures.

Wyeth's choice of moments to illustrate in Treasure Island is as carefully calculated as Stevenson's own choice of scenes to narrate in detail. His pictures are deliberately arranged so that the meaning of each picture is related both to the pictures that surround it and to the text in which it is set. The cover illustration showing three pirates raising the Jolly Roger does not correspond to any particular scene in the novel but offers a generic reference to that grim moment in any pirate saga when the buccaneers run up their colors in preparation for an attack. Thus the pirates appear to prepare an attack on the cover, sweep down the beach on the endpapers, and pause guiltily on the title page, reflecting on the price they are likely to pay for their crimes as they bury their treasure.

Stevenson divided his story into significant parts, each of which is carefully subtitled and develops a particular phase of the action. Wyeth takes advantage of the way Stevenson sets his story up, arranging his illustrations so that those grouped together play off one another effectively. In the pictures for the opening sequence of the story, called "The Old Buccaneer," Bill Bones stands lookout in the first illustration and lunges out of a darkened doorway in the second; then Blind Pew moves menacingly toward the viewer in the third, tapping his way with a stick that sweeps dangerously across the road. These images, full of energy and menace, suggest strongly that the springs of action in this story lie with the pirates.

The details Wyeth has added to Stevenson's narrative at every turn magnify the impressiveness of the pirates. In the first illustration, Bones is posed like a monumental statue on a cliff, seen from below. His stance, his billowing cloak, and his telescope held like a weapon make him at once the archetypal seaman on the lookout and a commanding figure—much more imposing than the sick old pirate of Stevenson's story. The figure of Blind Pew is never very clearly described by Stevenson, but Wyeth has given him the face of a death's head, with broken teeth. And the fingers of his outstretched hand, which claw at the air in a threatening gesture, are echoed in the thrusting tree branches of the wintry scene and especially in the shadows of those branches which lie across Pew's path. The effect is thoroughly chilling.

The pictures for the second segment of Stevenson's story, "The Sea Cook," are more static, more emblematic. In the first, Jim Hawkins says goodbye "to Mother and the cove" (57). In the next, Jim enjoys a quiet moment in the galley of the Hispaniola with the friendly sea cook, Long John Silver. Taken together, this pair of pictures is designed to emphasize the contrast between the safety of the cove and the dangerous and deceptive world into which Jim is moving.

In his depiction of the first scene Wyeth employs color, composition, and original added detail to give the reader a feeling for the complex emotional tone of the moment. The composition of the picture is quite striking. Dazzling sunlight illuminates the left side of the picture, where a sturdy woman stands weeping, her face buried in her apron. Jim is turned away from her, advancing toward the viewer and into the dark shadows cast by the house, which somewhat obscure his face. He is seen in outline, like Bones and Pew; and, like the blind Pew, he carries a stick which extends before him. The picture presents the moment of choice as Jim leaves home to pursue the pirate treasure, and he is shown pausing "on the sill of shade." There is a certain poignancy in the situation which is not grasped by the Jim Hawkins who, as Stevenson describes him in this moment, thinks only of the captain and the treasure. Stevenson's Jim has no weeping mother to make his leavetaking difficult; indeed, the reader is specifically told that Mrs. Hawkins was in good spirits as her son left, and for Stevenson's Jim it proves surprisingly easy to turn the corner and put "home out of sight" (57). Wyeth's picture, however, picks up the faint undertones of tragic retrospect which appear in the narrative of his own adventures by an older and wiser Jim Hawkins, a Jim who can describe his own boyish day-dreams of adventure this way: "Sometimes the isle was thick with savages, with whom we fought; sometimes full of dangerous animals that hunted us; but in all my fancies nothing occurred to me so strange and tragic as our actual adventures" (53). Stevenson's reminder here of the fallibility of the young focal character lends a certain plausibility to Wyeth's suggestion in his illustration that Jim might not have "seen" his mother's tears.

Wyeth makes the seamen of the "faithful party" (164) square-shouldered, clear-eyed, resolute, and unmarked by a brutal past. They have no broken teeth, sabre scars, sinister tattoos, or appalling deformities. Among the pirates, Pew is blind, Bones scarred, Black Dog has lost two fingers, and, of course, Silver has lost a leg. The very idea of the pirate with one leg haunts Jim's nightmares in the beginning of the story; and yet when he meets Silver the boy is struck by his pleasantness and his normality. Wyeth dramatizes this by taking care, in his picture of Jim and Silver in the galley, to disguise Silver's handicap. As Jim stands (in the same pose as Billy Bones atop the cliff), hands on hips, leaning backward to compensate for the roll of the ship, a thoughtful Long John regards him quietly, head bent, face in shadow, his tell-tale leg concealed from view.

The third part of the story, "My Shore Adventure," features two illustrations. In one, the leaders of the "faithful party" hand out loaded pistols "to all the sure men" (101); in the other, a feral Ben Gunn leaps "with great rapidity behind the trunk of a pine" (111). Wyeth stresses here the ironic twist of fate which awaits the treasure hunters: the weapons of these strong men will guarantee neither their survival nor their triumph—these will depend instead on the sly, childlike castaway. Wyeth's portrait of Ben Gunn is a clever visual allusion to the traditional "resourceful" image of Robinson Crusoe, and readers reminded of it may be encouraged to accept a little more readily the perhaps excessively convenient activities of Stevenson's deus ex machina later in the story.

The section Stevenson calls "The Stockade" has two pictures which clarify the differences between the "faithful party" and the pirates. In the first, the dutiful Captain Smollett defies the pirates, running up the Union Jack on the roof of the blockhouse with his own hands. This scene offers a vivid contrast to the similar scene on the book jacket in which the pirates hoist the Jolly Roger. Wyeth gives Captain Smollett snowy linen, a carefully powdered wig, and a most dignified bearing. All these proclaim him to be an eighteenth-century gentleman, above manual labor. When he climbs to the roof of the rude blockhouse and removes his coat to run up the Union Jack, the significance of the moment is clearly asserted by the details supplied by the artist. Stevenson's hints concerning body language, gesture, clothing, architecture, and iconic symbols like the flag are translated into visual specifics by Wyeth, who shares with the inexperienced reader his own knowledge of the elaborately coded symbolic systems human beings have contrived to convey information about themselves. In the second picture for this section, in contrast to the world of order and dignity suggested by Smollett's gesture in raising the flag, the savage pirate crew, armed to the teeth, swarm "over the fence like monkeys" (161). Like Stevenson, Wyeth tends to show the reader the moment just before a bloody confrontation—but the pirates look strong and menacing as they move into the foreground, almost seeming to threaten the viewer, and their bestial appearance contrasts effectively with Captain Smollett's elegant rectitude.

To the innocent eye of a reader concerned mainly with action and adventure, Jim Hawkins's great triumph in the story must seem to be the sequence in which he single-handedly steals the Hispaniola from the villains. But a close reading of Stevenson reveals that here, when he seems most free, Jim is caught up in circumstances beyond his control, and this paradoxical situation is well imaged in the pair of pictures Wyeth provides for the next section of the story. When Hawkins relates the next section of the story, "My Sea Adventure," Wyeth shows the reader what Jim sees through the window of the ship's cabin where two of the pirates, Hands and O'Brien, are "locked together in deadly wrestle"; this is followed by a picture of Jim's confrontation with Hands. The first of these pictures in effect shows a murder, and the second depicts the split second before a fatal accident: Hands is about to hurl the dagger which will cause Jim's pistols to discharge and so, in effect, bring about his own death. In the first picture, Wyeth shows Hands and O'Brien struggling for a knife (not mentioned in the text) and the reader is free to conjecture that this is when Hands acquires the weapon which he will throw at Jim in the next picture. In the fight scene, Wyeth adds a discarded jacket, an overturned chair, and a bottle rolling about the floor among scattered cards, as if to indicate what "drink and the devil" have done to the combatants.

In these pictures Wyeth capitalizes on the unsettling effect produced by the roll of the ship. In the scene with Hands and O'Brien, the lines of the wall and floor indicate that the ship is rolling badly, and the effect is even more striking in the next picture, where the steady line of the sea on the horizon and a bit of land visible in the corner of the picture suggest that the ship, which has gone aground on a sandbar, is canted at a forty-five degree angle. The lines of the mast and the rigging lead upward and converge on the figure of Jim, who clings to the mast, pointing two pistols down at Hands, who holds the knife he is about to throw. Jim's face is an important focal point here. It is close to the viewer and only in light shadow; but, inexplicably, it is so badly blurred that the expression cannot be read. The pitch of the ship suggests the uncertainty of the world in which Jim is moving, and Wyeth's blurring of Jim's face is perhaps an attempt to convey visually that what is about to happen will do so without Jim's volition. Like Stevenson, Wyeth wishes to attenuate Jim's responsibility for the killing of Hands, which becomes nothing but a reflex action. Jim, whose firing of the pistols is neither conscious nor deliberate, is well imaged in the featureless automaton of Wyeth's illustration.

Wyeth concludes his set of illustrations with three magnificent pictures for the section Stevenson called "Captain Silver." The first shows what Jim saw through a loophole in the Stockade wall: a semicircle of pirates cutting the Bible so that they can pass Silver the "Black Spot." Wyeth contrasts the Bible-cutting of the superstitious and self-defeating sailors, posed and lit like some kind of satanic ritual, with a picture of Long John swinging along on his crutch, a purposeful figure of demonic energy who easily pulls the helpless Jim along on a rope "like a dancing bear" (244). This illustration serves as an emblem of the real relationship between Jim and Silver. The figure of the boy struggling at a rope's end evokes the image of the doomed, hanged man Wyeth devised for the title page and may remind the reader of how often Wyeth has chosen to show the young Jim echoing in stance and gesture the pirates with whom he will eventually recognize a fearful kinship.

The title-page illustration for Treasure Island, as is usual with Wyeth, had suggested the nature of the essential conflict in the story (see fig. 1). In it the pirates look furtively about as they bury their loot, projecting fear and guilt in every gesture. One crouches in despair with his head in his hands, while another is in the act of drawing his sword to protect himself against invisible enemies. These figures are painted brilliantly in realistic detail, but about them and above them swirl billowing, dreamy clouds, and in the sky overhead Wyeth has lightly sketched the huge, translucent image of a hanged man. Part of the horror of this figure is its helplessness as it dangles, arms bound, head bowed, above them. The hanged man symbolizes their fate, their future, their deepest fear. Yet, significantly, they do not seem to see him. They are armed to face a more immediate enemy and are blind to what looms above them. This picture strikes the keynote of Wyeth's version of the story, stressing the themes of helplessness and tragic blindness that in Stevenson's narrative are conveyed by the voice of the older Jim as he reflects on the exciting treasure hunt which initiated him into the ways of a corrupt world.

The final picture of a series, like the opening picture, occupies a powerful rhetorical position. If Wyeth had used his title-page illustration to suggest the atmosphere of guilty fear which pervades the book and to hint at the tragic blindness with which its protagonist stumbles through his adventures, here he had to convey the hollowness of Jim's triumph at the end of the story and the boy's dim recognition both that the treasure had been fatally tainted by all the crimes committed for it and that he and Silver have more in common than he would like to admit. In his final illustration, Wyeth shows us the treasure cave at last. He catches the disillusioned tone of Jim's description of the treasure that had been the occasion of so much "blood and sorrow," such "shame and lies and cruelty" (265) by choosing to make the cave not the "large, airy place, with a little spring and a pool of clear water, overhung with ferns" of Stevenson's description (275) but a dark brown cavern with a great curved roof, like the inside of a giant mouth. In this deeply shadowed final picture Wyeth suggests the rueful self-knowledge of the older Jim by showing the blind, unthinking boy who had left on his quest with such bright dreams as a faceless creature hunched over his treasure hoard, letting the glittering coins slide down his fingers into storage bags like some fairy-tale gnome or like a sad allegorical embodiment of greed.

An illustrator's vision, as I have suggested, can have a powerful impact on the way a reader experiences a text, and Wyeth's pictures embody the story in a very different way from, say, the fluent drawings of Louis Rhead or the mordant sketches of Mervyn Peake. Stevenson as author and Wyeth as illustrator seem unusually well-matched. Wyeth's pictures for Treasure Island translate the ironic doubleness at the heart of the written narrative into effective visual terms and open up alternative aspects of character and unexpected thematic and structural nuances for the reader's consideration. Perhaps they are especially effective in projecting the darker strain in Stevenson; Wyeth once confided to his mother that "for some reason or other Anything that I appreciate keenly and profoundly is always sad to the point of being tragic" (quoted in An American Vision 4). But, as many a dazzled reader can attest, they also do full justice to the romance, the glamor, the purely aesthetic appeal the pirate myth held for them both. Stevenson's and Wyeth's characters may do the darkest of deeds, but the pictures presenting them are invariably beautiful.

Works Cited

An American Vision: Three Generations of Wyeth Art: N. C. Wyeth, Andrew Wyeth, James Wyeth. Essays by James H. Duff, Andrew Wyeth, Thomas Hoving, and Lincoln Kirstein. Boston: Little, Brown & Co., 1987.

Scholes, Robert. Semiotics and Interpretation. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982.

Stevenson, Robert Louis. "Bagster's Pilgrim's Progress." In Familiar Studies of Men and Books: Criticisms, vol. 5 of The Works of Robert Louis Stevenson. South Seas Edition (32 vols.). New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1923.

——. The Black Arrow: A Tale of the Two Roses. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1916.

——. David Balfour. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1941.

——. Essays. 1892. Reprinted with an introduction by William Lyon Phelps. The Modern Student's Library. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1918.

——. Kidnapped. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1913.

——. Treasure Island. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1911.

Wyeth, Betsy James, ed. The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945. Boston: Gambit, 1971.

TITLE COMMENTARY

TREASURE ISLAND (1911)

Paul Heins (review date April 1983)

SOURCE: Heins, Paul. "A Centenary Look: Treasure Island." Horn Book Magazine 59, no. 2 (April 1983): 200.

One last word about the status of classics. Since certain pictures can become inextricably bound up with a story, Scribner's is to be commended for its recent reissue of Treasure Island with the N. C. Wyeth illustrations made from new plates to ensure the best possible reproduction. After the paintings were completed, the artist—whose own centenary was celebrated in 1982—jubilantly wrote that he considered them "better in every quality than anything I ever did." They have been magnificently reproduced. Henry James spoke of the "open air feeling" of Treasure Island, but N. C. Wyeth's pictures go far beyond blue seas and blue skies. Many of the scenes are suffused with chiaroscuro effects and thus add the drama of light and shade to the drama of rough deeds and perilous moments.

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Hazel Rochman (review date August 2003)

SOURCE: Rochman, Hazel. Review of Treasure Island, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Booklist 99, no. 22 (August 2003): 1973.

Gr. 5-9—[Treasure Island ] is one of the best in the picture-book-size Scribner Storybook Classic series. True to the spirit of Stevenson's timeless novel, Timothy Meis' abridged retelling captures the bloody action of mutiny on the high seas and the cutthroat quest for hidden treasure. The story is told through the eyes of brave cabin boy Jim, who fights off the murderous pirates and bonds with their one-legged leader, Long John Silver. Wyeth's thrilling, handsomely reproduced paintings, originally done in 1911, will attract a variety of readers, including some older high-schoolers. In dark shades of brown and red, the pictures focus on the grim, exciting struggle on board the ship and on the island. At the same time, there's a burning golden glow in the background of almost every scene, keeping readers in mind of the treasure that drives the wild action. The most unforgettable painting—and one of Wyeth's most famous—is the melancholy scene of Jim leaving home as his mother weeps in the background. It's the elemental adventure.

KIDNAPPED: BEING MEMOIRS OF THE ADVENTURES OF DAVID BALFOUR IN THE YEAR 1751 (1913)

Publishers Weekly (review date 17 September 1982)

SOURCE: Review of Kidnapped: Being Memoirs of the Adventures of David Balfour in the Year 1751, by Robert Louis Stevenson, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Publishers Weekly 222, no. 12 (17 September 1982): 115.

Like the publisher's reissue of Treasure Island (1981), this new edition of another Stevenson masterpiece [Kidnapped ] resembles the original exactly. Especially to be savored are Wyeth's marvelous paintings, depicting the trials and triumphs of David Balfour, his perfidious Uncle Ebenezer and the Jacobite David befriends, Alan Breck, who, in turn, saves the hero's life and fortune. Set in 1751, the stunning adventure follows the abducted youth as he is sent to suffer hardships at sea, far from his native Scotland, and endures the abuses of scoundrels before he returns at last to recover his stolen inheritance and live at peace among the people on his blessed island. The book should appeal strongly to adults and to younger readers.

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THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS: A NARRATIVE OF 1757 (1919)

Carolyn Phelan (review date 1 November 2002)

SOURCE: Phelan, Carolyn. Review of The Last of the Mohicans, by James Fenimore Cooper, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Booklist 99, no. 5 (1 November 2002): 490.

Gr. 3-5—This large-format book showcases Wyeth's beautiful, dramatic illustrations for The Last of the Mohicans. More than three times larger, at 11 1/2 by 9 3/4 inches, than the pictures in the familiar Scribner Classic edition, these reproductions are more clearly defined, more intensely colored, and probably closer to Wyeth's original 42-by-30 inch oil paintings than the older prints. It would be misleading to imply that children are clamoring for a short version of Cooper's 1826 novel or that even a respectful adaptation such as this one can capture the spirit of the original. Still, the familiar title and stunning illustrations will attract parents, and possibly children, to the handsome volume.

THE WYETHS: THE LETTERS OF N. C. WYETH, 1901-1945 (1971)

Kirkus Reviews (review date 1 September 1971)

SOURCE: Review of The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, edited by Betsy James Wyeth. Kirkus Reviews 39, no. 17 (1 September 1971): 1066.

[The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945 ] is the voluminous correspondence of N. C. Wyeth, the illustrator, from 1902 when he left Needham, Massachusetts, to 1945, when he died. Although the editor, his daughter-in-law, has cut it by half to well over 800 pages, she could easily have applied herself further. There is far too much incidental detail ("I changed my underwear three times last week") and it is questionable whether the letters themselves have the "unusual richness" she finds therein. True, always a strong attachment to the home he left—the "homesick days" go on for years—and to his "Mama," the recipient of most of these letters (she kept them until her death in 1925). The essential points of interest are his work (particularly for Scribners), his family, his responsiveness to "the quiet poetic beauty of nature," and of course young Andrew who as a very small child already "looks as though he were going to be a great composer or artist." Wyeth unquestionably was an expansively sentimental man—a simple one—and in these letters he just "ramble[s]—just the way I talk I guess." Even with the 130 illustrations, color and black-and-white, it does not appear to be more than the family keepsake that it originally was.

Publishers Weekly (review date 6 September 1971)

SOURCE: Review of The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945, edited by Betsy James Wyeth. Publishers Weekly 200, no. 10 (6 September 1971): 47.

Had these letters [The Wyeths: The Letters of N. C. Wyeth, 1901-1945 ] been written in some esoteric foreign language, they would still proclaim their American roots. The famous artist and sire of artists (he died in 1945) personified the essence of the Protestant ethic in America early in this century. At once fascinating and awesome in their intensity, the letters he wrote to his folks-at-home over a period of four decades reveal a man obsessed with the idea of family. Collected by Betsy James (Mrs. Andrew) Wyeth, they constitute a marvelous piece of Americana. Here is Wyeth a homesick young art student in Howard Pyle's classes, Wyeth the young illustrator anxious to give it up for serious painting. The unconscious self-portrait emerging from his letters reveals a man devoted to the land, a man who lived so intensely through his parents, brothers and children that by his middle years he was a virtual patriarch. The book is an extraordinary family chronicle. 130 illustrations not seen by PW should enhance its already strong appeal.

N. C. WYETH'S PILGRIMS (1991)

Publishers Weekly (review date 23 August 1991)

SOURCE: Review of N. C. Wyeth's Pilgrims by Robert San Souci, illustrated by N. C. Wyeth. Publishers Weekly 238, no. 38 (23 August 1991): 62.

Best known for his illustrations of such classics as Treasure Island and Robin Hood, N. C. Wyeth also had a successful career as a muralist. In the '40s he created a series of murals for New York's Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, presented here [in N. C. Wyeth's Pilgrims ] in all their restored glory. The paintings offer an idyllic, highly romanticized vision of Pilgrim life—the robust men and women and lush surroundings, for example, don't even hint at the severe deprivations suffered by the original colonists. This shortcoming is outweighed by the breathtaking scope and beauty of the illustrations and the glimpse they offer of an unspoiled country's bounty. San Souci's workmanlike text is well researched, accurate and packed with information. Unfortunately, it never rises above the prosaic, and ends up sounding like the soundtrack to a particularly didactic documentary. Geared primarily toward the classroom (the book is dedicated to the schoolteachers of America), this volume isn't without merit, but its lack of immediacy and sparkle will not do much to breathe life into the subject of history. Ages 8-12.

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FURTHER READING

Biographies

Bader, Barbara. "N. C. Wyeth." In Children's Books and Their Creators, edited by Anita Silvey, pp. 695-97. Boston, Mass.: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1995.

Details the instruction Wyeth received from Howard Pyle and outlines Wyeth's professional career.

Manning, Victoria. "Newell Convers Wyeth: 1882-1945." In Visions of Adventure: N. C. Wyeth and the Brandywine Artists, edited by John Edward Dell and Walt Reed, pp. 114-15. New York, N.Y.: Watson-Guptill Publications, 2000.

Provides a brief overview of Wyeth's life and career.

Criticism

Dillin, Gay Andrews. "Stevenson Anniversary Editions." Christian Science Monitor (3 December 1982): B8.

Recommends the one-hundred-year anniversary editions of Treasure Island and Kidnapped, both illustrated by Wyeth.

Lask, Thomas. "Still Classic." New York Times Book Review (13 November 1983): 41.

Observes that Wyeth's illustrations for Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe seem to naturally belong to the text and are seamlessly incorporated into the novel.

Nemerov, Alexander. "N. C. Wyeth's Theater of Illustration." American Art 6, no. 2 (spring 1992): 37-57.

Discusses Wyeth's relationship with Howard Pyle and chronicles the influence that Pyle, Rembrandt, and Henry David Thoreau had on Wyeth and his art.

Sebesta, Sam Leaton, and Carol Dana. "Critically Speaking: Literature for Children." Reading Teacher 41, no. 8 (April 1988): 836-37.

Presents a favorable review of the Scribner Illustrated Classics re-release of Robert Louis Stevenson's The Black Arrow, illustrated by Wyeth.

Additional coverage of Wyeth's life and career is contained in the following sources published by Thomson Gale: Dictionary of Literary Biography, Vol. 188; Dictionary of Literary Biography Documentary Series, Vol. 16; Literature Resource Center ; Major Authors and Illustrators for Children and Young Adults, Eds. 1, 2; and Something about the Author, Vol. 17.