N.C. Wyeth: WWI

American Red Cross Poster by N.C. Wyeth

"In August 1914 the Wyeths spent a week at the Jersey shore. While they were away, war broke out in Europe. Three publishers instantly fell on N.C. Wyeth to cover the war. Special delivery letters began arriving at the rate of one a week. Telegrams followed. No sooner had they appeared at the door than Wyeth whisked them away without comment.

Few Americans in 1914 expected to fight in Europe's war. They felt it was Europe's problem. William Randolph Hearst, who had already furnished images of one 'glorious little war' for the sake of circulation, was once again on the trail of war artists. Hearst offered Wyeth a chance to join two writers covering Cossack regiments in Poland. The job would mean spending the next eighteen months in Eastern Europe, painting 'flying cavalry, glitter of clashing steel, roar of cannon, the cry of victors' at double his current earnings. But Wyeth resisted, sticking to Chadds Ford and his family. 'My responsibilities here are entirely too important and vital to fool with life that way,' he said.

On April 6, 1917, The United States entered the war in Europe. By June every young man Wyeth knew had answered the draft call. As requests for recruiting posters arrived from Washington, he chafed at the disruption in his work, taking time out from 'King Arthur' to do his bit for the U.S. Navy publicity department, a six-by-ten-foot poster of an American Neptune protecting the freedom of the seas. Later that year he painted posters for the Red Cross but didn't like the results. 'I'll be glad,' he confessed, 'when my share of this work is done.'

On July 13 the War Department offered N.C. Wyeth a first lieutenant's commission. With the former newspaper artist Wallace Morgan, he was to report for duty as an official artist at the front. Here was his second chance to witness war in his own time. But at the same time he was disinclined to let Carol and the children live on $1,800 a year, the annual pay of a first lieutenant, especially since two days before she had given birth to another child, a boy - Andrew Newell Wyeth III.

Twice more he was called to go abroad as a war artist: first from General John Joseph Pershing himself,  then from The American Red Cross to sketch refugees and maimed and blinded soldiers. He realized that seeing the Great War would help 'not only to meet the demands in the field of illustration for the coming years, but to get that something into my blood which all vital painters of this generation will have to have.' But again he declined, believing that 'My art vanishes into the merest speck when suffered comparison to the one divine and tangible sensation bequeathed to us: parent to child, child to parent.' 

He never went to Europe, not in war nor in peace. 

To be continued

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