N.C. Wyeth: The Books

"Robin Hood and His Merry Men"
by N.C. Wyeth

"With the publication of 'Treasure Island' in 1911, N.C. Wyeth moved into his harvest years. The pictures marked the beginning of a long series of illustrated classics for Scribner's and other publishers. Almost every year a new book with a fresh set of glowing pictures was added to the list, which included such classics as 'Kidnapped,' 'The Black Arrow,' 'Robin Hood,' 'The Last of the Mohicans,' 'Westward Ho!,' 'The Mysterious Island,' 'Robinson Crusoe,' 'The Deerslayer,' and 'The Oregon Trail.' 

The format of the books followed a standardized pattern, generally seven inches by nine and a quarter, with a four-color paper jacket, the same picture pasted on the linen binding, a two-color endpaper panel and sometimes chapter headings in line work. The long series of book illustrations gave him scope to exercise his color gifts, and they show gradual experimentation and enlargement of his color vocabulary. His palette, beginning largely in the earth-color range, added much of Pyle's medieval richness and splendor; then, attracted more and more by our American landscape impressionists, his color range was often heightened and ventured into the rainbow spectrum.

Even with the incessant press of work he found the time to roam the hills and the meadows with acquisitive eyes, probing, rejoicing, remembering. But there were images other than those of the Brandywine in his memory - those of the rocks and blue water of the Maine coast near Port Clyde where the Wyeth family spent the summer months. The valley and the Maine coast furnished almost all the material not only for his illustrations but also for his easel paintings.

By the late twenties and the thirties his easel pictures were being widely shown and greatly admired, but there were always the critics who used the word 'illustrator' as a denigrating label. He resented the implied barrier between illustration and painting but his life was too filled with projects to enter into controversy. Both the illustrator and painter, he believed, were artists engaged in pictorial communication. He could see that the illustrative, the narrative element had emerged strongly in the work of master after master, from Giotto to Rubens to Delacroix. Both illustrator and artist, he believed, should be measured by the degree of their talents, not by artificial compartments contrived by critics."

To be continued

(Excerpts from "The Brandywine Tradition" by Henry C. Pitz.)