Newell Convers Wyeth [N.C.]
1882-1945 American Illustrator.
A student of Howard Pyle, Wyeth got his start working for magazines in the first decade of the 20th century. His first published piece was a Saturday Evening Post cover, “Bronco Buster,” in February 1903. In 1904, Scribner’s Magazine and the Post jointly sponsored a Wyeth trip West, to observe and paint the vanishing world of the cowboy, resulting an illustrated article, “A Day with the Round-Up,” for Scribner’s in March 1906. Wyeth settled in Chadd’s Ford, Pennsylvania, near Howard Pyle’s summer home. Aside from his Western work, Wyeth’s most lasting contribution his work on the Scribner’s Classics illustrated stories for young readers, beginning with his hugely successful landmark edition of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island in 1911. (The image at the top of this post is a grisaille painting with a bright yellow background that served as the book’s endpapers.)
N.C. Wyeth, “One more step, Mr. Hands, and I’ll blow your brains out.” Illustration for Treasure Island, Scribner’s Classics edition. 1911.
N.C. Wyeth, The Bronco Buster, 1902. This image was used as the cover illustration for The Saturday Evening Post, February 21, 1903.
Wyeth went on to produce more than 30 illustrated classics, including Stevenson’s Kidnapped (1913) and Black Arrow (1916); J.F. Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans (1919), a new version of Robin Hood (for David McKay, 1917), and The Boy’s King Arthur (1917). Wyeth also produced mural paintings (including one in the Missouri State Capital in Jefferson City) and advertising posters and calendars. He harbored a lifelong desire to work as a painter, and to forswear illustration. But the money was too good, the illustration too strong, and the painting mostly too tepid for such a result. Wyeth’s son Andrew (b. 1917) assisted his father in illustration projects but went on to work as a painter, especially in egg tempera.
N.C. Wyeth, Stand and Deliver, cover illustration, Life Magazine, September 22, 1921.
Together with Pyle, Wyeth helped to invent the popular image of Caribbean piracy in the popular mind, exerting notable influence on cinematic treatments of same.
N.C. Wyeth: New Perspectives opened in 2019 at the Brandywine Museum of Art, bringing a somewhat more balanced and critical approach to Wyeth’s work. The backward-looking orientation of the Brandywine crew generally and Wyeth in particular contribute to a complicated cultural assessment. Wyeth’s advertising work, de-emphasized if not mostly ignored until recently, sheds interesting light on his career. (My own essay in said catalogue engages this material.)
N.C. Wyeth, “Montana” The Last Stand, McClure’s Magazine cover illustration, September 1906
A few more facts below. Paragraphs below abridged from Wyeth entry at American National Biography. Quoted material is italicized.
“Despite paternal opposition, Wyeth’s mother fostered his interest in art, enabling him to enroll successively in Boston’s Mechanic Arts High School (graduated in 1899), Massachusetts Normal Arts School, and then in classes with illustrators Eric Pape (1901) and Charles W. Reed (1902). At the urging of friend and fellow student Clifford Ashley, Wyeth journeyed to Wilmington, Delaware, in October 1902 to enter the Howard Pyle School, directed by the period’s most well-known illustrator of books and journals. The rigorous course of study and the commanding presence of Howard Pyle exerted a lasting influence on Wyeth. He wrote to his mother after the first week that “the composition lecture lasted 2 hours and it opened my eyes more than any talk I ever heard” (Letters, p. 21).
Pyle advocated realism and authenticity, combined with an intense dramatic element… in February 1903 [Wyeth] saw the publication of his first magazine cover, a spirited bucking bronco, for the Saturday Evening Post. By the time he left Pyle’s classes in August 1904, commissions for magazine illustrations enabled the young artist to support himself. Wyeth’s early letters document a boundless enthusiasm for his work that translated into paintings of great action and vitality.
He decided to concentrate on western scenes, and Pyle, who recommended direct knowledge of one’s subject, urged him to travel west.
…Between 1904 and 1906 Wyeth made three trips to the western United States, where he absorbed the region through a variety of adventures and collected western gear that served as props for future paintings.
N.C. Wyeth, The Pony Express, 1912 Used in N.W. Ayer Advertisements for American Telephone and Telegraph Company. (See below)
Advertisement, American Telephone and Telegraph Company, 1912.
N.C. Wyeth, Bronco Buster, illustration for Cream of Wheat advertisement (rare for its omission of the COW chef Rastus). 1906. Here is NCW dusting off a success [SEE Post cover, 1903] and re-executing, for mercenary purposes. COW was a major advertiser in American periodicals, often on the inside front cover of the Saturday Evening Post and the Ladies Home Journal.
During this period [Wyeth’s] commissions multiplied rapidly; his pictures appeared in many magazines, including Century, Harper’s, Outing, Saturday Evening Post, and Scribner’s. Among the best of his early western pictures are seven illustrations that accompanied “A Day with the Round-Up,” an article Wyeth wrote for Scribner’s (Mar. 1906) describing his own experiences on the range. In 1907 Outing published four of Wyeth’s pictures to illustrate an article titled “How They Opened the Snow Road” (Jan. 1907). Unusual compositions and masterful interpretations of snow and light create highly dramatic effects in these paintings. He excelled in action pictures, but his reputation also rested on subtle and sensitive depictions of Native Americans, including those of the eastern woodlands. In 1907 Outing offered its readers “The Indian in His Solitude,” a portfolio of prints comprising five of Wyeth’s paintings.”
N.C. Wyeth, endpaper illustration, The Last of the Mohicans, Scribner’s Classics edition, 1919.
N.C. Wyeth, “Nature in the Raw is seldom MILD,” advertising illustration for Lucky Strike, 1932. The ad copy references the Fort Dearborn Massacre, an event (otherwise called the Battle of Fort Dearborn) in which Potawatomie Indians defeated American troops, an engagement in the War of 1821. (August 15, 1812.)
Wyeth’s romantic representations of American Indians, problematic in certain respects and prominent in his vision of the West, are undermined by his advertising work, as shown in the Lucky Strike campaign above. Similarly discomfiting pictures and messages show up in his work for Aunt Jemima Pancakes.
Quoting now from my catalogue essay for the Brandywine Museum retrospective, New Perspectives:
Smaller scale and lessened ambitions mark the work that Wyeth produced for the Aunt Jemima company. The character of Aunt Jemima was a repurposed minstrel show figure, the female equivalent of Rastus: a harmless, compliant, romanticized former slave with a talent for pancake preparation. The owners of a flour mill in St. Joseph, Missouri, dreamed up a pre-mixed batter product and attached it to the persona of Aunt Jemima. Improbably, in the process they uncovered a way to merchandise the antebellum South to northern and southern consumers alike during a period of racial upheaval. Jemima, just like Rastus, helped to domesticate and sentimentalize the memory of slavery in the United States.
[For a sustained reflection on the South in American advertising, consult Karen L. Cox’s excellent book, Dreaming of Dixie: How the South was Created in American Popular Culture (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2011).]
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At his best, Wyeth captures an adventurous dream state, transporting readers to a two-fisted, if narrowly populated, romantic past.
N.C. Wyeth, Library Adventure, cover illustration, Ladies Home Journal, March 1922.
N.C. Wyeth, Corn Harvest, 1935. Much of Wyeth’s painting (that is, image-making for non-applied contexts) tended toward the backward-looking. Here is a horse-drawn harvest in the 1930s. There is an American regionalist quality to this work (and others of the decade) that begin to feel somewhat more modern.