Newell Convers Wyeth was born into a farming family in 1882, in Needham, Massachusetts,
the oldest of 4 brothers From an early age his talent for drawing was
obvious and although his father didn't approve his mother encouraged his artistic aspirations.
In his later teens he went on to study at the Massachusetts Art School, and the Eric
Pape School of Art in Boston.
In 1902 at the age of 20 Wyeth traveled to the Brandywine Valley to study with the immensely
influential Howard Pyle.
And only a year later he took his first commission, a cover illustration of a cowboy riding a
bucking bronco for the Saturday Evening Post.
This was a prestigious entry into professional illustration and in 1904 the Post commissioned
him again to provide more Western-themed images.
In that year Wyeth set off for the first of several trips to Colorado, where he lived
and worked as a cowboy and ranch hand, and used his first-hand knowledge of the West
and Native American culture in many of the magazine illustrations he produced.
On his return to Pennsylvania in 1906 he married Carolyn Brenneman Bockius, and started work
on a series of American farming scenes for the publishers Scribner's.
In the same year he took his first advertising commission and created some cowboy-themed
illustrations for Cream of Wheat press ads.
Like many others of his generation, who also painted almost exclusively in oils, his career
as an illustrator was entirely reliant on the full colour offset lithographic printing
process, which allowed the illustrator to paint without technical constraints required
by the method of reproduction.
He did create a small number of line only illustrations, and a few early monochrome
halftones, but it was with his more visually satisfying full colour work that his reputation
was made.
In 1908 he and his wife moved to Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania, along the Brandywine Creek,
and the couple subsequently had 5 children, among them their son Andrew, who would later
become a successful and highly respected artist.
At the end of the first decade of the 20th century Wyeth began to move increasingly toward
the illustration of classic adventure literature, and his first foray in this arena was a rousing
visualisation of Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island, published in 1911.
This collection of dramatically absorbing oil paintings, which were created at sizes
many times bigger than they were actually reproduced, was a considerable commercial
success, and with the proceeds he paid for the building of a large house and spacious
studio in Chadds Ford.
All Wyeth's work was particularly well researched, , and he used models, props and scenic observation
to inform the sketches and studies he would make in the production of his illustrations.
In 1913 he returned to Stevenson's writing with an edition of Kidnapped, and once again
his energetic dramatically staged colour images made a significant contribution to the book's
popularity.
At this time he was also producing cover art for pulp fiction magazines, but this involvement
ultimately proved to be sporadic at best, and book work continued to be his overwhelmingly
dominant platform.
As early as 1914 Wyeth was on record lamenting his own commercial success, saying ' I have
bitched myself with the accursed success in skin-deep pictures and illustrations'.
But despite this self-pity by the middle of the second decade of the century Wyeth had
become a ubiquitous and highly valued presence in American illustration, and in 1916 his
popularity as a book illustrator continued with the first two of what would be a long
line of works of fiction set in medieval times.
Mark Twain's The Mysterious Stranger was the author's last and unfinished work, and although
Wyeth's evocation of the period was highly romanticised the plausibility of his representational
painting was such that the reader was happy to become immersed in the world he created.
And he demonstrated the same ability with the second publication in that year, which
was another Robert Louis Stevenson adventure The Black Arrow, set against the dramatic
backdrop of the War of the Roses.
He stayed with British myth and legends for 1917's tale of Robin Hood, and as with many
of his other images the characters and scenarios he produced became virtual templates for Hollywood's
later romantic visions of medieval England in any number of swashbuckling movie productions.
Such was his astonishing productivity at this time that he also published The Boy's King
Arthur in the same year.
Arthur was another fictional character, who supposedly lived in 6th century England, but
the narrative and consequently Wyeth's visualisation projected him into a glamourised knights in
armour evocation of the 12 century.
But as usual the images were painted with such authority that even the most sceptical
reader would happily suspend their disbelief.
He also produced some propaganda in support of the USAs involvement in the Great War,
but not to the exclusion of his other commitments, and in 1918 his illustrated edition of Jules
Verne's fantasy adventure tale The Mysterious Island was published.
Wyeth once more apparently effortlessly created a series of credible images which brought
the narrative to visual life.
In the following year his edition of James Fennimore Cooper's adventure The Last of the
Mohicans was published, and this was another commission which was tailor made for his remarkable
ability to capture and enhance the most telling and dramatic written passages.
The embarrassment of riches he created at this time - and for that matter throughout
his career - make it impossible to include all his book projects.
But among them were an edition of Daniel Defoe's 17th century novel Robinson Crusoe in 1920,
illustrations for Charles Kingsley's seagoing adventure Westward Ho!
in the same year, and in 1921 a darkly atmospheric edition of Washington Irving's story of Rip
Van Winkle.
Incredibly, given the volume of illustration he was creating Wyeth also found time to paint
and in 1922 he created a mural titled the Giant, which was displayed in Westtown school
to commemorate the life of a former pupil Wyeth had known.
And at the same time he continued to create covers and interior page illustrations for
several popular American magazines including the humour magazines Life and Judge, as well
as others such as The Ladies Home Journal.
And as if that wasn't enough to keep him busy he also returned to advertising work with
a series of press ads featuring classical composers for Steinway Pianos.
In 1922 he continued his spectacular run of medievalist narrative work with an edition
of The White Company, by Arthur Conan Doyle, which was set during the 100 years war between
England and France.
1924 saw the publication of The Legends of Charlemagne, by Thomas Bullfinch, and as the
title suggests the book was much more a work of fantasy than it was actual verified history
and Wyeth indulged himself appropriately with some more than usually fanciful illustrated
work.
Around the same time he returned at to American literature with two books.
One was the Deerslayer, another Fennimore Cooper fictional account of a backwoodsman,
and the other was The Oregon Trial, originally written by Francis Parkman in 1848.
Far less expected was his highly memorable edition of Homer's Odyssey which was published
in 1929.
This project gave him the perfect opportunity to tackle an ancient classical narrative,
and the challenge of illustrating the fantasy heroic element of the story was one he more
than rose to.
This series of vividly and expressionistically painted, but formally composed images had
an other worldly visionary quality and made it one his most distinctive achievements in
illustration.
In 1930 he returned to art with a 17 by 12-foot mural of George Washington on his way to new
York to be sworn in as president.
And 2 years later he completed the even more ambitiously scaled and remarkably detailed
mural Apotheosis of the Family, which measured 60 foot by19, and was commissioned by the
Wilmington Savings Fund Society in Delaware.
And in 1932 he allowed himself to be tempted to create illustrations for a highly successful
if massively insensitive and misleading press campaign for Lucky Strike cigarettes, which
co-opted Wyeth's longstanding popular association with Western themes.
His resentment of his commercial success, and presumably work such as this in particular,
had not mellowed over time, but although there was some evidence that he was painting more
for its own sake during the 1930s he still couldn't bring himself to abandon book or
advertising work.
The Parables of Jesus was a particularly well executed and suitably reverent and dramatically
restrained series, which successfully evoked the moralistic stories told by Christ in the
New Testament, and Wyeth's edition was published in 1931.
He had long been an admirer of the philosophical outlook of the American naturalist Henry David
Thoreau, and he paid homage to him with 1936's book Men of Concord.
This was a series of wistfully bucolic images based on the journals Thoreau had written
in praise of leading a simple life in rural surroundings in pursuit of happiness.
In the late 1930s his work was used for commercial calendars, including this pair for Coca Cola,
and another titled the Alchemist for the Hercules Gunpowder company in 1938.
And in 1940 he returned to fiction with the book The Yearling, written by Marjorie Kinnan
Rawlings, and this seems to have been his last such project.
I certainly couldn't find anything published later, and the pictures he created for this
book give a clear indication that even if Wyeth resented his illustration he was incapable
of letting it show in the quality of the work, which was as engrossing and well painted as
it had always been.
When the USA entered the Second World War Wyeth produced a small volume of propaganda,
as he had in the Great War, and in 1943 undertook a large commission for Coca Cola to produce
a sponsored series of historical wall charts.
His last painting was Nightfall, which was completed in 1945.
Tragically that was also the year in which he and one of his grandsons were killed when
their car was hit by a train at a railway crossing near his home.
Wyeth was 63 years old
In his lifetime he had created more than 3,000 paintings, the vast majority of which were
published as book illustrations.
And although Wyeth himself he may have been frustrated by his lesser success as an artist,
his contribution to the development of 20th century representational illustration and
the pleasure his mesmerising narrative images has brought to countless numbers of readers
continues to resonate and happily shows no sign of fading into obscurity any time soon.