N. C. Wyeth
Who
American illustrator and painter, born in Needham, Massachusetts, on 22 October 1882 and killed at a railroad crossing near his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, in 1945. He joined Howard Pyle's school in Wilmington, Delaware, in October 1902, sold a Saturday Evening Post cover within five months, and went on to paint more than 3,000 pictures and illustrate 112 books.
Why they matter
He made the adventure classic look the way Americans still picture it. His oils for Scribner's Illustrated Classics, beginning with Treasure Island in 1911, are big, theatrical canvases painted for reproduction, and the pirates, frontiersmen and knights in them set the image of those books for a century. He was also the head of an artistic family: his children include Andrew Wyeth and Henriette Wyeth Hurd.
What to buy
The books are the way to own the work, and which printing you buy matters. The Scribner Illustrated Classics he painted for came as quarto hardcovers in black cloth with a pictorial plate on the front cover. Check the plate count: mid-century printings cut the pictures, so the 1933 Treasure Island has 12 against the 17 of 1911. The current Scribner Classics editions have gone back to all of the first edition's artwork, newly reproduced from the original canvases with the text reset in the original typefaces, and are the cheapest honest way in; they are mostly printed in China, where the old ones were American work. The paintings themselves are in museums or come up at major auctions, a separate and far more expensive market, so originals are not a realistic purchase. For wall prints there is no museum shop link here: the Brandywine Museum of Art, which holds the core of his work, runs its own shop, and a poster is only as good as the photograph behind it. Book: Christine B. Podmaniczky's N. C. Wyeth: Catalogue Raisonne of Paintings (two volumes, Brandywine Museum of Art and Scala, 2008), 1,922 paintings from 1902 to 1945.
Notes
The Brandywine River Museum of Art at Chadds Ford holds the largest collection and shows his house and studio; the Farnsworth Art Museum in Rockland, Maine, and the Portland Museum of Art also hold his work. The Brandywine keeps a free online version of the catalogue raisonne with updates and his drawings. He painted murals too, for the Missouri State Capitol and the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston among others. Public domain in the US, so his illustrations are widely scanned. He shares a birthday with Edmund Dulac: both were born on 22 October 1882.
Story
In 1911 Charles Scribner's Sons asked Wyeth to illustrate Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, his first book for their series of illustrated classics. He painted 17 large oils on canvas. The book was a great success, and the fee was enough to buy 18 acres at Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, where he built the house and studio in which generations of Wyeths would work.
The pictures had a stranger fate than the book. Scribner's hung them in its New York bookstore and sold several, and the set scattered. Two went to the New York Public Library, one to the New Britain Museum of American Art in Connecticut, one into private hands; most ended up with the Brandywine River Museum or the Wyeth family. One was destroyed in a fire in 1952.
In 2011, to mark the book's centenary and its own fortieth anniversary, the Brandywine River Museum brought all 16 survivors together in one exhibition. It was the first time the set had been in one room since Wyeth finished painting it, a century earlier, for a children's book that had to sell.
Key works
- Treasure Island (1911) - Scribner's, 17 oil paintings
- Treasure Island, endpaper illustration (1911) - Brandywine River Museum of Art
- Kidnapped (1913) - Scribner's
- The Last of the Mohicans (1919) - Scribner's
- The Yearling (1939) - Scribner's
In museum collections
- Bronco Buster (1906)
Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Rural Delivery (Where the Mail Goes, 'Cream of Wheat' Goes) (1906)
Minneapolis Institute of Art ↗ · Find a print ↗ - "Keep your arms folded!" (Education of Trooper Brown) (1906)
Indianapolis Museum of Art ↗ · Find a print ↗ - Illustration for "Drums" (1928)
Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art ↗ · Find a print ↗ - The Lobsterman (The Doryman) (1944)
The Met ↗ · Find a print ↗
See the work
Prints
Books
See also
Browse all 2,101 artists · Open in the directory · Where the work hangs: 17 museums on a map