N. C. Wyeth: A Biography - Hardcover

Michaelis, David

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0679426264 ISBN 13: 9780679426264

Publisher: Knopf, 1998

Synopsis

An American painting dynasty is portrayed in this huge, riveting biography of N. C. Wyeth.

        His name summons up our earliest images of the beloved books we read as children. His illustrations for Scribner's Illustrated Classics (Treasure Island, Kidnapped, The Last of the Mohicans, The Yearling) are etched into the collective memory of generations of readers. He was hailed as the greatest American illustrator of his day. For forty-three years, starting in 1902, he painted landscapes, still lifes, portraits, and murals as well as illustrations for a long shelf of world literature. Yet he proclaimed "the uselessness of clinging to illustration and hoping to make it a great art." He judged himself a failure, believing that illustration was of no importance.

        Despite the darkness of his temperament, he was a towering figure of gargantuan appetites and physical power. His passions were rooted in the nineteenth century. He made adventure, nature, and "the vastness of things" his earliest personal themes. America was his canvas.

        David Michaelis's biography of N. C. Wyeth tells the story of his family through four generations. It is
a family saga that begins and ends with the accidental deaths of small boys, a gothic tale that shows how N.C., while learning to live a safe and familiar domestic life, endangered himself and his children by concealing part of the family legacy--depression, suicide, incest.

        We see how his mother's emotional instability and his father's strictness set the stage for his profoundly divided personality. He found in fatherhood the foremost expression of his character--trying to create in the Wyeth homestead his dream of childhood at its most enchanting. He held his children enthralled through their adult lives. He persuaded his inventor son, Nat, to live at home, shepherded his daughter Ann's career as a composer, and taught his three other children--Henriette, Carolyn, and Andrew (N.C. was Andrew's only teacher)--to paint.

        The illustrations that N. C. Wyeth undervalued are now regarded as American classics--the paintings that appeared in Treasure Island, Kidnapped, and The Last of the Mohicans are in museums, joining, as John Updike wrote, "the mainstream of American easel painting."

        His work lives. The artist himself is brought alive in David Michaelis's fully realized portrait of this huge-spirited, deeply complicated man, his family, and an America that was quickly vanishing.

About this title

About the Author

David Michaelis is the author of three books. He lives in Washington, D.C., with his wife and their two children.

From the Back Cover

"An exemplary study of the influence of ancestry upon imagination, and of imagination's power to make art out of family experience."
--Edmund Morris

"The Wyeths, like the Kennedys or the Roosevelts, are a great American dynasty--a 'federal family,' as David Michaelis calls them. The patriarchal N. C. Wyeth emerges in Michaelis's nuanced prose as a tragic figure worthy of Dreiser--a man of capaci-
ous ambition and appetite, divided against himself. This extraordinary book restores him to his true stature in American art, and introduces a compelling new voice in American biography."
--Christopher Benfey,

author of Degas in New Orleans

Reviews

The violent deaths of N.C. Wyeth (1882-1945), arguably America's greatest illustrator, and his little grandson in a mysterious car accident contrasted markedly with his cozy, seemingly uneventful life, which was characterized beneath its placid surface by strong, ambivalent attachments to home and family. The son of a Massachusetts farmer and a Swiss-German immigrant, Wyeth began his professional career while studying under a giant of American picture making, Howard Pyle, and went on to become famous for his own editions of Treasure Island, The Last of the Mohicans and Robin Hood. All the while, he complained about the necessity of illustrating, which seemed to him a distraction from his true calling as a painter; from an early age, he raised his son Andrew to succeed where he had failed. Michaelis's graceful, informative but unfocused biography, which excerpts heavily from correspondence in the family archives, too often reads like a series of quotations, loosely stitched together. Absent consistent diagnoses, its repeated references to Wyeth's depressions and his mother's "nervous derangement" bog the narrative down and remain a puzzle. And although Michaelis (The Best of Friends) documents Wyeth's attempt to paint landscapes, he never addresses the question that was central to Wyeth's career: did his illustrations ever succeed as art? Michaelis identifies the source for some of Wyeth's most inspired illustrations; he even finds traits of Wyeth's difficult mother in his illustration of Treasure Island's reptilian Captain Pew. Still, the book offers too much evidence?that Wyeth was searching for a spiritual home, that Wyeth remained unfulfilled?and not enough summing up. Color and b&w plates not seen by PW.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

With unencumbered access to five generations of Wyeth family archives, Michaelis has written an exhaustive biography of famed children's book illustrator N. C. Wyeth. Wyeth's artwork and career are overshadowed here by Michaelis' many psychological theories and observations of the artist's personal life. From the time he was born in 1882, Newell Convers Wyeth never escaped his mother's toxic influence. Henriette Zirngiebel Newell was a near-hysterical woman whose husband catered to her lifelong irrationalities. Convers was raised, and subsequently raised his own children, in an oppressive maze of family secrets and fantasies. Michaelis painstakingly details the sense of suffocation, duty, and obligation of "home" that Henriette instilled in her boy. "Emotional stability eluded him. He would be dependent on others to maintain equilibrium all his life." N. C. Wyeth painted beautiful illustrations, but he could barely keep his personal life from rot and decay. A fascinating life story but one likely to disappoint those interested mainly in the artist's work. Karen Simonetti

Edition details

• Publisher: Knopf
• Publication date: 1998
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0679426264
• ISBN 13: 9780679426264
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 555