N.C. Wyeth: The Teacher and His Students

"Dark Harbor Fishermen" by N.C. Wyeth

"N.C. Wyeth began teaching in 1915. He took four young men into his studio from as far off as Denver and Ohio. He gave one composition lecture a week, followed by a sketch class on Saturday afternoons and a Thoreau reading Sunday night. Influenced by his apprenticeship with Pyle, he preferred the natural selection of a shared studio to the politics of academy exhibitions and juried competitions.

"Modeling himself on Pyle, he formed a partnership with the best of his students,called them associates, and made available to them his contacts at Scribners. Within months Dwight Howland was appearing in the magazine and Clark Fay had a book deal. Like Pyle, Wyeth made his students feel that their commitment to painting had mystical significance.

For Wyeth teaching was a revival. Students, he discovered, to his great joy, supplied the kind of emotional intensity he had been looking for in his brothers. Pitt Fitzgerald, a sensitive twenty-two-year-old who had studied at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, gave back passion to match his own. Five-feet-ten, slender, with a sweet smile, Fitzgerald became engaged to Carol's sister Ruth. It was the first in a long line of Wyeth students who would deepen the attachment to teacher by proposing to the women in his family.

Sadly after serving in WWI at Chateau-Thierry and the Argonne, Fitzgerald had returned in 1918 with shell shock. The memories were intolerable. Unable to function, he broke his engagement to Ruth and had a complete mental collapse, withdrawing to a sanatorium. Wyeth did not - could not - understand. He took it personally. He had counted on Fitzgerald, and now this incident had 'broken his whole faith in young men.' Vowing never to take another student into his studio, he wrote, 'I do wonder why I've been singled out to suffer so with young fellows whom I have tried, deeply, to help so much.'"

"However, in 1923 Peter Hurd arrived in Chadds Ford, with a click of his heels and a salute. He had recently left West Point after struggling through a personal conflict of interests: the military or painting.  Hurd's respect for the work of N.C. Wyeth, and his own perseverance gave him the opportunity to meet Wyeth at his home in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania. The meeting went well, and soon Hurd moved to Chadds Ford, and became a student of the renowned illustrator. Peter Hurd later commented that West Point was tough on its students, but N.C. Wyeth was tougher. For the next ten years, he lived and painted under the strict guidance of his teacher. All of the Wyeths were quite taken by this handsome, energetic young man in cowboy boots and hat, but none so much as N.C.'s eldest daughter, Henriette, who married Peter Hurd in 1929.  

John W. McCoy arrived at Chadds Ford in 1933. He was a quiet, dignified young man from a valley family. The son of a Du Pont executive, McCoy had ambitions as a painter. He had gone to Cornell and painted in Paris. He quit the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts to study with N.C. Wyeth. He felt immediately like a member of the family. He and Ann started dating and became engaged and waited two years to marry. He lived and painted in Chadds Ford, and Spruce Head, Maine until his death in 1989. His unique introspective interpretations of the Brandywine Valley and the coast of Maine established him as a top New England painter. McCoy taught at the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts from 1946-1961."

But the finest students of Wyeth would prove to be his own children.

To be continued

(Excerpts from "N.C. Wyeth" by David Michaelis.)