N.C. Wyeth: Influencing Cinematography

"The Captives" from "The Last of the Mohicans"
by N.C. Wyeth

"One Sunday, N.C. Wyeth looked up from the midday meal to see a preposterously long and elegant town car pulling up outside his door. Inside sat Joseph Hergesheimer, the newly celebrated novelist and friend, who lived nearby. He announced that he had driven movie star Lillian Gish over to say hello. Another time he introduced the Wyeths to F. Scott Fitzgerald and his wife, Zelda. The Jazz Age had come to Chadds Ford. 

The tempo of the new decade eluded N.C. Everyone was in a hurry. Modern life had a snappy, sassy edge. Architects sent steel towers soaring into the sky, but N.C. remained right where he was, earnest, stern, incorruptible, and permanently sentimental. The aspirations of the last century - solemnity, grandeur in nature - impressed him so much more. 'I love to see things unchanged,' he said.

Pictures, too, were now in motion. The movies fascinated - and alarmed - N.C. He fretted that magazine publishers were 'trying to do the impossible,' expecting the picture on the page to behave like the picture on the screen. But Hollywood was still in debt to painting for pictorial standards, and when the great silent filmmaker Maurice Tourneur, who had been a painter, released 'The Last of the Mohicans' in December 1920, N.C. was flattered to see that Tourneur and his team had 'very obviously followed my pictures with marked fidelity, even to the selection of facial characteristics and certain poses and postures I represented. At times I felt as though some of my pictures had suddenly come to life. The sensation was singular indeed.'

He would not be lured, however. As the 1920s went by, Wyeth refused offers to work in Hollywood, repeatedly turning down Douglas Fairbanks's and Mary Pickford's enticements to direct pirate pictures. In 1926, drawn into one deal as assistant director, Wyeth go so nervous he bolted the room.

Even when talking pictures came in, Wyeth's illustrations went on being models for Hollywood directors. After seeing a private screening of Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer's production of 'The Yearling,' the author, Marjorie Rawlings, reported that 'they copied exactly several of his 'Yearling' paintings. That is, as exactly as physical 'properties' and human being could copy the greater art of his brush.' Director Clarence Brown said that he had faithfully reproduced in scenes no fewer than eight of Wyeth's fifteen original pictures, 'and they were the highlights of the film.'"

To be continued

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