sc4-962-3d
The Private Universe of N.C. Wyeth | Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold | Scene4 Magazine | October 2016 |  www.scene4.com

Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold

Say the name Newell Convers Wyeth, and most conjure up the swashbuckling illustrations of Treasure Island, King Arthur or Last of the Mohicans, but N.C. Wyeth also enjoyed an artistic career apart from his commercial endeavors. A new, small but well selected exhibition at Rockland’s Farnsworth Museum showcases Wyeth’s oils, many of which depict the artist’s private world on the Maine coast in and around Port Clyde. The founder of a now-three-generation dynasty of iconic American painters (including Andrew and Jamie Wyeth), N.C. Wyeth was born in 1882 and until his death in 1945, was associated with many of the early 20th century modernist movements in American art.

 

Born in Needham, Massachsetts, to a family with pre-Revolutionary roots on the paternal side and literary connections to Thoreau and Longfellow on the maternal, he studied illustration with George Noyes and Charles Reed and then went on to become a pupil of Howard Pyle, then considered the dean of American illustrators.  From Pyle, Wyeth acquired a respect for historical accuracy, but preferred history cloaked in drama, theatricality, and romance.

 

Photo2TreasureIsland-cr

 

In 1903 the twenty-year-old Wyeth had his first cover appear on the Saturday Evening Post, and this launched a highly successful career in commercial art.  He married and settled in Chadds Ford, in Pennsylvania’s Brandywine, where he and his wife Carolyn raised five children. Wyeth gradually moved away from the Western themes which distinguished his early illustrations to paintings of classic literature, creating famous series for Treasure Island, Robinson Crusoe, Robin Hood, Kidnapped, King Artthur, The Yearling, and Rip Van Winkle among others. His genre paintings also graced the covers of popular magazines such as the Saturday Evening Post, Harper’s Monthly, the Ladies Home Journal, Century, and McClure’s in the golden age of print magazines.

 

Increasingly after 1914, Wyeth struggled to devote time to his private painting and often was tormented by the ramifications of his own commercial success. His oils took their cue first from Impressionism, and later from the American genre painting of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood, the Romanticism of Winslow Homer, and finally from other modernist movements such as Cubism and the Fauves, especially as reinterpreted by American artists like Marsden Hartley.

 

In the 1930s Wyeth purchased an old sea captain’s home in the tiny coastal hamlet of Port Clyde, Maine, named it Eight Bells after Homer’s painting, and brought his family there each summer thereafter, thereby establishing the Wyeth connection to Maine. He was killed when a derelict freight train struck his automobile at a railway crossing in Chadds Ford in 1945. At the time of his death, he was at work on an ambitious commission of murals for Metropolitan Life Insurance in Plymouth, MA, and he had been honored as a fine artist by acceptance into the National Academy and the Pennsylvania Academy of Fine Arts.

 

The more than a dozen large scale oils at the Farnsworth’s Wyeth Center span the two decades between 1917-1937 and give an excellent account of Wyeth’s experiments as a painter, as well as a subtle glimpse into the close-knit private world in which he worked. Wyeth’s subjects are nature in its seasonal shifts, the sea in its many mercurial moods, and his home refuge of Port Clyde. His characters are the plain folk who were his neighbors – the hardworking fishermen, sea captains and housewives who called this rocky windswept village their home, as well as the other creatures such as the gulls, crows, and sheep who shared the St. Georges Penninsula – all depicted with a blend of knowing intimacy and objectivity. The canvasses are large; the brush work vigorous; the surface texture minimal. Compositional elements are dramatically chosen with arresting angles, jarring geometrics, and unique perspectives, and always there is an air of the painter’s awe as he steps back from the scene and lets the image take on its own life.

 

Photo3CaptTeel-cr

 

One of the earliest paintings in the show is Captain Teel Passes (1917), which reveals the old seaman walking past a gray vertical house that occupies the foreground. There is a starkness to the composition and the landscape – a sparseness that matches the tough old salt whose features (like so many others in N.C. Wyeth’s paintings) are blurred into a kind of universality.  A similar approach is seen in the oil study for Fisherman and His Wife. These are again studies of Teel and his spouse – both faceless and defined by their dark clothing and strong geometric solidity in a composition that reminds of Grant Wood’s American Gothic. It is, however, the row of gulls neatly aligned atop the roof which offers the whimsical complementary by making the human actors a mere fragment of the overall scene.

 

Photo4FishermanFamily-cr

 

Other “portraits” in the exhibition include The Fisherman’s Family (1933) – a grouping of a grim couple with a little girl in the foreground, all framed by the linear angles of lobster traps. As with so many of these human studies, the people are only apportion of the theme, integrated as they are into the embrace of nature and the symbols of their toil.

 

Photo5AnnReading-cr

 

The two far more personal portraits are of Ann Reading (1930) and Portrait of the Artist.  The first depicts the artist’s daughter clothed in flowing summer white on a sunny porch in Port Clyde, immersed in a book and a tiny Boston Terrier sits at her feet. The second is a dramatic look at son Andrew perched on a rocky promontory, painting the turbulent sea.

 

Photo6GrandfatherHouse-cr

 

A different kind of portrait, but portraits nonetheless, are the paintings of inanimate structures that Wyeth makes his primary subjects, but even these houses appear to have a soulfulness that emerges under scrutiny. The Morris House (1937) is an image of his neighbor’s dwelling on Horse Point Road in Port Clyde, in which the house’s two occupants are shown, somewhat incidentally, in the front yard, while the dark house itself dominates the canvas. The house is a structure as weathered and yet as forceful as its setting and its inhabitants. Another is entitled My Grandfather’s House (1929) and shows a large yellow structure in the snow.  The house itself dwarfs the dark figure shoveling snow in the foreground or the dog playing
in the drifts.

 

Photo7EightBells-cr

 

Perhaps the most famous of all these house portraits is Eight Bells (1936), a painting of the rambling white gabled structure on a hill above the Port Clyde harbor. What is fascinating here is the slight aerial perspective that allows the viewer to look down on the house as well as the cove and gives the entire setting a feeling of being timelessly suspended in the rhythm of nature.

 

Photo8DyingWinter-cr

 

Like Eight Bells, other canvasses like Dying Winter (1934) absent mankind entirely.  It captures the vibrancy of the cold season. Three crows line the fence and neutral tones part the white snow suggesting the pulsating earth beneath. And then there is the striking view of Port Clyde (1925) with its panoramic sweep and its quasi-folklike rendering of the houses and water with two-dimensional linearity.

 

Photo9Herring-cr

 

Among the most dynamic paintings in the collection, however, are those canvasses that portray the working men of Port Clyde.  Herring (1935) shows the fishermen harvesting the tiny, wiggling, iridescent alewives.  The dinghy itself forms the sweeping diagonal that bisects the canvas; the muscled fishermen either have their backs to the viewer or, like the other portraits, are faceless – their energy evident in the powerful motion of their labor. Gulls flock hungrily overhead, vying with the men and fish for the lion’s share of attention. A similar animation is present in Cleaning Fish (1933), while an earlier untitled work shows lobstermen in the top third of canvas organized in triangles and enveloped in a white haze that speaks to the influence of the American Impressionists.

 

Coupled with this impressive collection of N.C. Wyeth’s oils is a small exhibition in the lower galleries of Wyeth artifacts in the collection of the late Charles and Julie Cawley.  Among these artifacts are quite a few plates for N.C. Wyeth’s most famous Treasure Island series.  Revisiting these after spending time with the artist’s private oils proves an instructive comparison. The illustrations are masterworks in their own right, but in many ways, very very different in inspiration. They are detailed, accurately costumed, staged with the master hand or theatre director and practiced eye of a set designer; they are narrative in impulse and virtually burst with dual power of the word and the image. Despite their small scale (though they were initially created as large canvasses), they fill the page - and the room - with energy.

 

In contrast the paintings are quiet, introspective, sometimes even reticent.  That is until you stand before them in the same contemplative spirit.  Then, like the vast coastal landscape of Maine from which they take their inspiration, they begin to ebb and flow into the viewer’s consciousness. And different as they appear at first glance, one also detects similarities in technique: N.C. Wyeth’s affinity for unusual compositional angles and perspectives, his ability to animate the subject whatever it is; his skill in finding the drama and the romance in the moment.  The characters in the personal oils are Wyeth’s very own - his family, friends, neighbors and the sea, the fields, and the creatures who share his world – rather than the heroes of romance.  But in his hands these come to life with a compelling iconography and mythology of their own. Like the works of his son Andrew and grandson Jamie, N.C. Wyeth’s paintings offer a glimpse into a private universe that evokes in so many ways a lost place and time in our collective American consciousness.

 

N.C. Wyeth Painter remains on view at the Farnsworth
Museum, Rockland, ME until December 31, 2016.

Post Your Comments
About This Article Here

Share This Page

View other readers’ comments in Letters to the Editor

Scene4 Magazine - Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold | www.scene4.com

Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold's new book is Coarousel and Other Stories (Weiala Press). Her reviews, interviews, and features have appeared in numerous international publications. She is a Senior Writer for Scene4. Read her Blog.
For more of her commentary and articles, check the Archives.

©2016 Carla Maria Verdino-Süllwold
 ©2016 Publication Scene4 Magazine

 

 

Sc4-solo--logo62h

October 2016

Volume 17 Issue 5

SECTIONS:: Cover | This Issue | inView | inFocus | inSight | Perspectives | Special Issues | Blogs COLUMNS:: Bettencourt | Meiselman | Thomas | Jones | Marcott | Walsh | Alenier | :::::::::::: INFORMATION:: Masthead | Subscribe | Submissions | Recent Issues | Your Support | Books CONNECTIONS:: Contact Us | Contacts&Links | Comments | Advertising | Privacy Terms | Archives

Search This Issue

|

Search The Archives

|

Share:

Email

fb  


Scene4 (ISSN 1932-3603), published monthly by Scene4 Magazine–International Magazine of Arts and Media. Copyright © 2000-2016 Aviar-Dka Ltd – Aviar Media Llc. All rights reserved. Now in our 17th year of publication with Worldwide Readership in 141 countries and comprehensive archives of over 9000 web pages (36,000 print pages).
 

Time-0716
Scientific American - www.scene4.com
Penguin Books-USA www.scene4.com
Character Flaws by Les Marcott at www.aviarpress.com
Thai Airways at Scene4 Magazine
HollywoodRed-1